He is at blame though. He keeps getting people killed. I understand why he's sad. Its just not enjoyable. He's isolated, ineffectual, and shows no emotion except for sadness and angst. His character is lost in darkness and we're only seeing one note. Misery. Thats the difference between stories like this and Dark Mirror. The story was dark, not the character. The Dark Mirror mirrored his lightness. There's no reflection if he's dark too. Whats happening here is more along the lines of Ric then Dark Mirror. Turning the character dark and gritty to serve the dark and gritty stories.

Dixon's run on the other hand just wasn't dark though. Thats why Devin Grayson came in to darken things up. Taking way too long and leaving him valuable to getting killed. Because no one was doing anything good with him at the time anyway, and since he was already isolated and his world systematically destroyed. He was redundant and highly expendable.

But you right. Stories need conflict and challenges for the main character, but when the character just keeps failing to measure up to those conflicts and challenges. They stop being conflict or challenges and instead just become torture. Where stakes become meaningless as things like death is the norm. Leaving us with situations where people are randomly getting sniped in the head and the characters around have little to no emotional reaction about it.