I never had a problem with Quesada wanting to end the Parker/Watson marriage. I think it was a mistake to begin with. It was the jump the shark moment when you give the character and the audience what they wanted and don't know where to go from there.
Mary-Jane was an interesting character before she married Peter. She was a coked out promiscuous party girl
(Read the comics before she suddenly knew he was Spidey all along. It's all there if you're looking.) who truly loved our hero and he loved her too in his own way. Peter was the nice guy but with his head on a swivel when it came to the ladies. He loved MJ but she was a bit of a hot mess to be honest and they'd never be able to make it work long term. So he was banging Black Cat and some hot civilian chicks when the opportunity presented. They were both smart as whips and good people despite their faults.
Then Pete asked
Lindsay Lohan MaryJane to give up drugs and fornication with hot rich dudes to sit in his low rent apartment and wait to see if he was dead or not from his latest scrap with the homicidal maniacs he picks fights with on the regular.
Astoundingly, she said yes and also decided to get a complete personality transplant at the same time going from a fiery untameable natural red head to a whiney stock "cops wife" character who alternates between standing by her man and wishing he would quit, depending on what neck bearded incel loser who couldn't write a real woman because the only ones he new well were siblings or parents was in charge. Suddenly Mj's red hair seemed more like a dye job.
MaryJane who had been an interesting and compelling supporting character and emotional foil to our hero became a stock wife character of little to no distinct personality in the blink of an eye. David Micheline was the main writer at the time and handled the newly weds kinda okay after the jump the shark moment but I suspect that Peter's marriage was constrained by some serious editorial edicts that Pete and MJ's marital bliss stay closer to domestic paradise than anything realistic or narratively compelling. The writers following Micheline were obviously also to constrained or to cowardly to inject any conflict or otherwise realistic drama into the doomed marriage between the formerly coked out hotty and the photographer who banged whatever babes he could find to deal with the death of the love of his life, Gwen.
The interesting and logical directions Pete's life might take being married to a woman like the party girl he asked were never explored honestly at all so instead we saw hackneyed external threats to the marriage like homicidal stalkers and job offers from out of state to add tepid drama to the boring relationship for 20 fucking years.
There were lots of ways to tell the tale of Peter and MJ that would have made for superb stories but a combination of incel writers and PG editorial edicts made for the mostly boring personal life readers endured until Quesada came along and said (
rightly) this isn't really working and anything that happens in Peter's personal life seems trite.
But what Quesada did next was beyond retarded. Instead of hiring a mature writer who'd seen a real girl naked in a bedroom instead of a strip club to write the break up or fix the boring nature of the Parker marriage he decided to write the biggest most retarded example of Deus Ex Machina anyone could imagine and have
the Devil steal his marriage for reasons that no reader of comics that include Mephisto would ever buy.
His soft retcon was justly trashed by anyone capable of tying their own shoes and the story of Pete and MJ instead of having a climax and resolution that would satisfy and/or anger the fans got put in limbo for years as a specter to hang over Peter's personal life and romantic decisions for the next decade of books written mostly by D&D incels like Dan Sloot. Quesada took the cowards way out.
A lot of people who didn't read Spidey back then and know how wonderful the characters of Pete and MJ were before the marriage will disagree and some who did read them will as well but the move to marry Pete and MJ was a colossal mistake story wise.
Don't @ me.
They gave Peter his happily ever after. And then they tried to continue the story
inside a happily ever after ending which was a retarded and cowardly editorial decision destined to lead to a downgrade in story telling for the next 20-30 years.
Interestingly, DC married Clark and Lois a few years later, handled it well, and Supes mostly improved in storytelling as a result. Different characters where a happy marriage made more sense. Unlike Pete and MJ, Clark and Lois were boring for decades before they got married and the wedding gave them new directions to take their boring relationship.
The Banner/Ross marriage has worked from an
interesting story perspective as well.
Who knew that conflict between complicated characters leads to compelling stories?
EDIT: TL;DR
The Peter and MJ marriage was a mistake to begin with but Quesadilla only fucked it up worse.
