I was thinking of a mutant code-named Chop, who can take an amazingly large stack of paper and cut it in half with a paper-cutter.

Well, that's my real-life mutant power, anyway. Honest!

As for Claremont, his X-Men has highs and lows, but I've never been able to read anyone else's for very long.

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So did I, very briefly! Then they split the team in two and I quit again.

I did pick up the occasional issue after that. I was vaguely fascinated by Silvestri's looser, more newspaper-strip style, and bought a couple of those. The team berating and sneering at helpless, hapless Havok for not being a true warrior born; for not having earned his place beside this team of blood-bonded warriors and being a "boy" with much to prove, set my teeth on edge. Seriously, when you've been created by Neal Adams and served during the arguably most creative era in the team's history, you shouldn't have to take guff from the British side character in pink with the diaphanous flowing sleeves for how tough you are. The X-Men under Claremont often climbed ALL the way up their own asses. 

I revisited again during the Jim Lee period, buying a few back issues to catch up. Again, the art was interesting. Never was a second-or-third generation artist more obvious in taking from his inspirations. Issue #274, you're reading the story of Forge being tortured in a Barry Windsor-Smith from Weapon X basement, turn the page, and bam! You're in Arthur Adams' Savage Land with that cute, romantic couple Rogue and Magneto! Again, stuck around for a few issues, but the weirdness of the Shadow King turning people into his "hounds" (how does turning human beings into dogs get to become a cliche?) finally ended that renaissance. Since then, the gaps between issues have been years in length.

Steven, I like your paper-cutting mutant, Chop. Perhaps he can work with the mutant master of vibration and edge-alignment, Jog. There could be an entire team made up of Stitch, Fold, Gripper, Offset, and should we pursue the adult market, Stripper and Trim. We'll call the book, "The Bindery..."

Wow! I love reading you Brian.

And you're right. At one point (perhaps between Uncanny X-Men 200 and 210), the  X-Men weren't heroes anymore but soldiers (with that weird line: "We're X-Men, we endure") and they lost something in the process.

Before that they were teenagers or young adults who fought evil mutants to protect a world that hated them and then they were warriors fighting just everybody (even themselves when a Marauder took control of Polaris...).

And Young Paranoid Superheroes (r) doesn't hold much interest for me.

Eric and Steven, I agree. In time, the X-Men became all about the X-Men. Not the adventures they undertook. Not the missions. Not Professor Xavier's Dream. It was just the X-Men reacting to attacks from foes of the X-Men or X-Men going to conferences about the X-Men or X-Men playing baseball with X-Men when the home of the X-Men is suddenly destroyed by X-Men hating robots... Maybe the X-Men would meet a group of mutants and invite them to join the X-Men, but the proud members of the mutant sub-community that were not X-Men would tell the X-Men that not to be an X-Man could still be a proud thing, not that the X-Men believed them, since they knew that being an X-Man was a burden and an honor like no other... 

At a certain point, a Superman story is about a bank about to be robbed or an asteroid that needs to be deflected. Batman, however inbred it becomes, is still somehow about Gotham and crime and dealing with loss... The X-Men, however, became all-but-entirely about the X-Men.