Pretty sure Chris Claremont was using Doctor Who for plotpoints for his XMen run
Wrong show. Claremont ripped off Avengers (most notably for the Hellfire Club) for plots not Doctor Who.
That being said, Claremont was a Who fan and used the fact that Marvel had the Doctor Who comic rights in the 80s to do a stealth crossover in Uncanny X-Men #217-218 via having the Brigadier and the UNIT boys (Benton and Yates) cameo in that story (with the art drawn so that we only saw the back side of the Brigadier and Benton/Yates drawn without faces as background extras the Brigadier talked to) show up for a fight with the Juggernaut. Not to mention that he had a UNIT rip-off literally called WHO as supporting cast characters in Excalibur complete with two sibling characters whose names were variations of Alistair Stewart.
They need someone intelligent enough to ask questions of the Doctor so the writer can explain things to the audience, but it doesn't work very well if the companion comes from a time where they would be baffled by things like electricity or space travel. I don't think that women would be unable to sympathize with some girl from the 1800s, but it would much harder to write for the character.
Having said that, I'm not a woman and the one thing I think is weird about the new Doctor Who is how much focus there is on the companions and their friends and families and how much the companions want to smooch the Doctor. I guess that's why the female fan base has increased from the old days, but it's still weird to read discussions about which Doctor is the cutest and which companion he should be dating. Even in the old days when some of the companions were explicitly billed as "something for the dads to look at", they were rarely treated as mere sex objects.
Blame RTD on that. It's widely been joked that Rose Tyler was his Mary Sue stand-in and that his decision to push HARD the shipping with Rose and Nine/Ten was him power flexing and self-inserting himself dating the Doctor. And kept going with this as the influx of shippers gave Doctor Who a much needed hook for the normie crowd that the BBC desperate sought with the revival. And didn't fully end until Capaldi came onboard.
Didn't Eccleston quit because he was really pissed about the quality of scripts?
We still don't know the full 100% story about why Eccleston left the show like he did, but the commonly accepted story that most believe to be the truth, that has floated around over the years was that it wasn't the scripts but RTD being utterly over his head making season one and acting like an asshole while doing so, and in the process cost Eccleston serious money as a result.
Eccleston was signed on to play Voldemort in Harry Potter 4 before signing up to do Doctor Who. The plan was that after filming season one, that Eccleston was going to go straight to the set of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Eccleston had apparently pushed hard to get the Voldemort role, because he knew the money he would make in it would make him set for life and allow him to do whatever the fuck role he wanted, as far as the residuals from the Harry Potter films ensuring that he never would have to chase money doing shitty film roles for a quick paycheck ever again.
But RTD was an incompetent showrunner who had never worked on a series like Doctor Who which had a LOT of work going on production-wise that RTD just wasn't ready to handle. And from additional stories, RTD was a huge prick to lower level production staff folk which pissed off Eccleston since he was a veteran actor and didn't hold his tongue when it came to calling out RTD for being an obnoxious asshole to low level folks since it was a sign of RTD being a bad boss to work for, as far as the notion that you can tell the quality of a production by how the top guy treats the lowliest of the workers.
But the final straw was that because of RTD being utterly unprepared to be a showrunner, production of season one went beyond the scheduled end date right into when Eccleston was supposed to show up on the set of Goblet of Fire. And as such, Eccleston was forced to give up the role of Voldemort (and that sweet sweet Harry Potter money that would ensure Eccleston would never have to slum again) and wait until RTD got his shit together and finished filming season one. At which point Eccleston (who supposedly was signed for one season but with an option to come back) said "fuck this shit, I'm not re-upping for another year" and quit the show and forced RTD to have to give Tennet a ring and get him to sign up for season two.
Moffat couldn't resist trying to be subversive with Hell Bent and really didn't want Clara to stay dead. Everything involving the Doctor defying the Time Lords when he was staying at the barn was compelling, but it really goes downhill after he becomes President and demands the extraction chamber.
Clara's ending always felt like a huge "fuck you" to RTD and what he did to Donna. Where RTD had Doctor right away lobotomize Donna and took away her memories of her time with the Doctor without even trying to find an alternative cure or at least allowing her the option of death once she realized how much she would mentally regress back to being a horrible person, Moffatt seemed to take the stance that the Doctor should have moved heaven and earth nad even remove his own memories if necessary than hurt his companion like that.
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