1 They're only ending the comic book in which the characters are grown up. (My guess is that it wasn't selling well.) The comics with the characters as teenagers will continue.

2 Previous comment notwithstanding, if he doesn't die in bed with a smile on his face all these decades have been a waste of time.

3 *blink*  When did Reed Richards die?  I don't recall anything about it, other than a vague memory of him and Sue both being believed-dead for a while back in the 80s, well before the whole Death of Superman dealie.

Not that I disagree with your point at all.  The various comic companies since Death of Superman have had to fight the temptation to use really cheap deaths to drum up attention.  I think its *finally* starting to swing around again, though:  even the writers themselves couldn't take the "every quarter, someone will die" editorial edict at Marvel seriously.  Hence why Johnny Storm's "death" was used more as a means to do a solo "lost in barbarian land" plot than anything else.

4 I wonder why it is, for comics, that "marketing" almost always equals "spoilers".   

Prime-time TV serials don't end with "tune in next week, when Bob dies."  Same for anime.  Movie trailers (comic-book-hero movies excepted, sometimes) don't tell you how the movie ends.  Novel trilogies end books on cliffhangers, not spoilers.

Is there some other media I'm unfamiliar with (daytime soaps, or something) that has to tell the audience what's going to happen in advance to get them to buy in?

5 Frankly, the thing I hate most in comics these days are huge, every-title crossovers.  They derail the story I AM following, and I'm not going to be tricked into buying fifty titles I don't want to read.