I could argue Jim Shooter is as influential as anyone in creating quality comic books.
I could argue Marvel came through it's "crisis" a decade before DC and this was thanks to Big Jim. O.K. Marvel went bankrupt decades later, but that is another story.
People often forget because he could be an ass and difficult, how prodigious he was from Kid prodigy on...
The one set of series of his that I would have loved to have seen grow, was his Defiant Universe, when everyone was producing the same old shit Defiant was seriously wacky we had a crazy twist on Shazam with Charlemagne, we had the crazy Quantum Magic and we had the absolutely leftfield bioengineered world of Plasm. We also had some genuinely nutty characters like War Dancer based on South American, Aboriginal and Hindu ideas all rolled into one.
Yeah that's a bummer but not surprising. I remember loving Dark Horse's attempt at making a shared superhero universe when they made Will To Power, X, Into the Vortex, etc. I loved Will to Power, but that whole universe seemed to go belly up pretty quickly.