Here's a snippet from an interview with Roger Stern about why he and JB left Captain America.  JB has described the events in the past and as many fans are still sorry about RS & JB leaving Cap, I thought RS's recollections might be of interest.

GK: Can you explain why John and you left Cap after #255?

RS: That gets a little complicated. Marvel was starting to crack the whip on deadlines, and all the editors were under pressure to get their books on time. I’d had some stomach trouble midway through our run on Cap, and John was about to get married, and Jim Salicrup was understandably worried that we would fall further behind. I thought we could pull ahead in just a matter of weeks – my digestion was already back to normal, and I knew that John’s work ethic was as strong as mine – and to prove it, I sat down and plotted the next three issues straight through. Jim was still uneasy about the deadlines, and so he decided to schedule a fill-in by another writer. I pointed out that we already had a fill-in underway; Frank Miller was drawing a stand-alone Cap story that I was going to script. (It eventually saw print in Marvel Fanfare.)

"By the Dawn’s Early Light!" featured in Captain America #247 by Stern, John Byrne, and Joe Rubinstein. The first issue with Rog and his collaborators in their short-lived classic Captain America run.

In those days before royalties, Marvel had what was called a "continuity bonus." If you wrote or drew six consecutive issues, you got a bonus. And so on for the next six, and the next. A fill-in before issue #258 would set all of our bonuses back.

But beyond that, I was worried about losing sales momentum on the series. We’d been working hard to build up the readership, and I knew from my days as an editor that fill-ins usually cost you readers.

Back during those early days of the Direct Market, when the greatest percentage of sales still came from the newsstand, it was a given that sales would dip after each fill-in. It could take a book’s regular creative team as much as three issues to get the readership back up to the pre-fill-in level.

Well, I couldn’t persuade Jim not to schedule a fill-in. And, looking back, if I had been in his shoes, I might have done the same thing. But I wasn’t in his shoes. I was the freelancer, and I didn’t like the way we were being treated.

I’d worked with Jim a long time and I really didn’t want to come to loggerheads with him. So, I took back all three plots, tore up the vouchers, and stepped away from the book. I figured, better to leave Cap on an up note with the 40th anniversary issue.

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I'd always heard the way JB described it but recently, there seems to be a lot of discussion about it in a few different places.  Maybe I'm just late catching up but the part of the story that doesn't mesh with what I "know" is primarily JB being behind on a title.  Stern seems to have just as good of a reputation but I really haven't followed his career as closely.

So, it just seems unusual to me that the situation back then would have gotten to the point that things were revolving around the Cap title being potentially late.  The bonuses and vouchers and stuff makes sense in a way but only when it got to that point.  Even if everything did get to that point, I'm a bit surprised that RS would want to just walk away from the book even if there was going to be a temporary loss or dip in readership after the fill-in.

Surprised too that that would even happen with JB on the title at the height of his popularity.

This is a very strange interview. Roger is reporting here a set of circumstances that are totally new to me. What I remember was a big blow-up when Shooter one day decided, arbitrarily and retroactively, that all the books must have single-issue stories. Rog and I were at that point a few pages into a three part Red Skull story, and Rog told Shooter we would be happy to switch to single issue stories as soon as that was done. But, as noted, Shooter's new rule (which, typically, didn't last long) was retroactive, and he insisted that we wrap up our story in a single issue. Rog said it couldn't be done, and after much back and forth, quit the book in protest. I quit to support him. (Jim Salicrup, who was editor, offered me the writing gig on CAPTAIN AMERICA, but I felt I needed to be loyal to Roger.)

From my end, it was never about deadlines. In fact, shortly after I got married and moved to Chicago, I got a call from Shooter saying that Marvel was going to be withholding my checks, because I was behind on the schedules and, since I was under contract, I was required to produce a certain amount of work in a specific amount of time. Given my reputation for never missing deadlines, Shooter was somewhat incredulous about this, but I offered that, yeah, given the chaos of moving and whatnot, it was possible a few deadlines had slipped past. I told him not to worry, as I was not hurting for money, and I would soon be back on schedule.

Then it turned out that a few of my vouchers, sent in all at once, had been mislaid, and that I was not only not late, I was actually AHEAD of schedule on one title, the FF. Bookkeeping was most apologetic, and my checks came thru in short order.

I have situations with my wife all the time where she remembers a conversation or event differently than I remember it, to the point that sometimes it feels like we were in two totally different states when said conversation or event took place.

And we've only been together 7 years.  So I can imagine things might get even more skewed when you add a couple of decades to that.

I really enjoy Roger and JB's Captain America run.

Fun, exciting, interesting stories that are timeless!

Ah, well! Perhaps it is so fondly remembered precisely BECAUSE it was so short-lived. We didn't have time to screw it up!!