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Thing is, those guest appearances we remember so fondly were there mostly to boost sales, too. Heck, EVERYTHING was there to boost sales.

The difference was a lack of cynicism on both sides of the equation, sellers and buyers. The object of the exercise was always and ever to SELL THE PRODUCT, but we who were the targets of those sales pitches did not think of ourselves as such (nor did we ever think of what we were buying as "investments"), and, except in rare instances, the creators were not thinking "what can I do that will be HOT?" (One of those rare instances in early Marvel was THE INCREDIBLE HULK, which was created to cash in on the success of the Thing, and which floundered around for six issues and then died.)

Stan and Jack, who should be role models to the current crowd, understood that to keep the audience coming back, and to "grow" the audience (to use a term that would never have occurred to either of them), they had to keep "pushing the envelope" with bigger and more spectacular stories. If the stories were worth reading, the readers would be there.

"If you build it, they will come." Not, "if you create a big enough con job you can sucker in the few who are left..."

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Time upon a once, such guest appearances (like Captain America in IRON FIST, above) were done in the hope of drawing attention to titles that SHOULD have been strong enough to stand on their own, but which, for some reason, were not getting the attention they deserved.

Thor can do anything Herc can do and probably offers more story possibilities but Ironfist seems more unique and a somewhat more rounded character to me than Shang Chi....and the glowing fist shtick that lets a street level dude knock out big guns never gets old.

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Iron Fist suffered from a triple whammy: he was the "other" kung fu character; and he was an attempt to "cross pollinate" that genre with superheroes, so we ended up with superhero fans who didn't want to read a kung fu book, and kung fu fans who didn't want to read a superhero book.