Truthfully, and this has nothing to do with you, Chewy, but I would prefer to have a new character introduced for the "Oracle"-like position with which Grissom was used in the last story. I think the support staff should be unequivocally non-team members, but that's just my personal preference. I remember Grimm talking about bringing in a "hacker"-type character for just such a role, but I have yet to see him do so.
I guess, if you don't have any intention at this time to use Grissom as part of the team, there's not much of a real-world reason to keep him as part of the stories. I like characters who are specifically meant for support staff roles but I find it unbelievable in the course of the story that an actual team member would step out of the team itself and join the support staff with no reason to do so. It's why I had Larry Lance and T.C., a year-and-a-half ago, take a "leave of absence" from the team rather than having them stay around even though their posters were long gone. I really think anything major done with characters created by posters should be left up to those posters. They can explain their leaves of absence in whichever way they want to should they ever return. Otherwise, it's not really our business to do so, and we're more likely to mischaracterize them horribly if we do (I've seen it happen several times).
The use of several of these poster-less characters (and multiple character use) in the Antarctica battle was an exception, not the rule, because the story called for an epic battle such as that. It's really an anomaly, though, not something we should be doing at all often. TC, Vengeance, and Kristogar Velo, for example, would have been done away with much earlier if it had not been for the fact that we wanted to use them in the Antarctica war.
