DC's downward spiral within a decade

CBR contributor Augie deBlieck is one guy from the site who seems to realize why Identity Crisis was truly awful, and he said:

It was ten years ago already that DC decided Doctor Light had to rape Sue Dibny. And it's been mostly downhill since.
— Augie De Blieck Jr. (@augiedb) December 28, 2014

I would say more like VERY downhill since, but this'll do for now. I think the downward spiral of DC's quality began with Armageddon in 1991, because that's when Hank Hall of the Hawk & Dove duo was sacrificed for the sake of sales, along with the second Dove, Dawn Granger. Then, we had Emerald Twilight and Zero Hour foisted upon us, along with a few more embarrassments. But yes, Identity Crisis was what really pushed DC superhero comics into the abyss of disaster. I recently found an old post from a now inactive blog telling something I hadn't thought of before about the panels where Dr. Light rapes Sue Dibny, because the scene was already repulsive enough: it's set up with a 1st-person perspective that makes it look like a video game (Doom, Quake, Heretic and Hexen). And that only makes it look all the more skin-crawling. I wouldn't be surprised if there'd been some computer influence in Meltzer's scripting, and the contrived fight with Deathstroke - who's only in there based on image value - has traces of this too.

What DC went through in the span of more than a decade is something very grimy that'll be very hard to wash away.