Hell, even if TPTB at Marvel WANTED to go back to that older style - what creators could they get to do it? Yes, Mr. Byrne, Roy Thomas, Walt Simonson, Roger Stern, maybe Mark Waid, and a small handful of others are still around. Messrs. Byrne, Miller, Simonson, Perez, Buscema, et. al. yet inhabit the mortal coil.

But how many of them are still capable? How many of them would DARE to go back to Marvel to try to restore them? Marvel comics is in its second or third generation of the blind leading the blind; they don't KNOW how to make what I think of as good comics anymore. Stop making events, stop making the comics about the creators, stop going for gimmicks... nobody knows how to do it anymore.

And that's without considering that the money men would NEVER allow Marvel comics to go off model of the TRUE income source... the movies.

In the end, I think this will be a clever and imaginative rearranging of the deck chairs to a formation that was extant just as the ship started sinking. But that's all, and entropy always increases.

Mr. Byrne once described the scenario in which Marvel might have obtained Superman. I'm wondering when we're going to see the first DC edition of Fantastic Four. :(

Edit: okay, maybe that's not the saddest part of the whole thing.  But it's still pretty sad.

For a good stretch of time, one could suspend disbelief and invest in the universe and the characters. The Spider-Man of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN # 100, 200, and 300 could all reasonably be viewed as the same character at different points in his history. Creative teams usually tried to keep characters on-model.

Times have changed. The 90s gutted the industry in more ways than one. Stunts and rock-star creators have taken over the industry. We never escaped the 90s. Worse, we now live in a remix culture. Artistic intent is dead. Creators pick and choose elements to embrace or discard like they're in a buffet line. No longer are those formative early stories of the 60s treated with respect or reverence. Indeed, they're instead treated as raw material to be exploited for the latest "shocking" stunts and events. 

At their best, the characters of Marvel felt like real people, with defined personalities and inner lives. Now, they're cogs in a corporate machine, serving the whims of writers, and as the R & D arm of the movie franchise. There are multiple versions of virtually every character, and no consistency whatsoever, be it among the creative teams, or between the print stories and the characters as they appear in licensed merchandise and other ancillaries and media. It's a Marvel Universe broken up into insane little fiefdoms. The House That Stan and Jack Built has been torn down and replaced with a brothel. 

For a few decades, Marvel presented readers with a wonderful cast of characters, and a pretty cohesive universe which added a layer of verisimilitude never seen before in the genre. But, nothing lasts forever. The comics may not yet be in their actual death throes, but, creatively, they've been dead and gone for quite some time. I stopped buying Marvel books in 2004, and I haven't looked back. 

(That last bit is a generalization, of course. I'm sure there's still quality work being produced, but the whole is certainly not greater than the sum of the parts, in this case.)

There is no other way to put it.