E.J. and Will should've happened, but network daytime and specifically the world and perceived audience Corday and DAYS cater to would not have been the place for it. It was all DAYS could handle to immediately wife Will up with safe Sonny, then make him (like many GLBT characters before him) a parent via heterosexual coupling to desexualize him as much as possible.   Billy Douglas and Joey probably should've happened on OLTL, since originally the plan was for the gay teen to be Chris McKenna's Joey. (FWIW, if I ran that show online today latter-day daddy McKenna's Joey would fill the soulful sexy Andrew Carpenter role, and we'd discover he's bi and has been casually having an on-off fling with a recast Billy for years since high school.) OLTL had wanted to make little Shane Morasco gay as well, which gives the interplay with wooden Andrew Trischitta's Jack, his tormenter, a different and darker tone, especially after his suicide attempt and his mother's 'death'.

I don’t think he’s saying it’s special in terms of pop history. Just that she had more and bigger chart successes than her peers of that era, which might surprise people who are more familiar with the hits of Britney, BSB, and *NSYNC. As big as they were, you’d think they’d all have five or six No. 1s. (Crazy that “I Want It That Way” or “Toxic” never topped the charts. Those were as ubiquitous as they come.)

I mean- imagine if Sami’s son had stolen her man, even if for just an affair.  That is a spin on an old soap staple, and would have made it fresh and interesting!  And what if they all made peace, but a year or two later they clear a desk John and Marlena style, and Gabi is the one that saw them?   So much good history to be played with there!

I feel like there are some sparks here and there in the late 90's and early 00's of soaps trying to tell ground-breaking storylines.   You had a lot of landmark firsts with Bianca (AMC) and Luke (ATWT) as long-running LGBTQ+ characters on their soaps. I also think Guiding Light also tried to tell a story about incest with Tammy and Jonathan. I'm also thinking of eventually AMC and B&B's eventual Transgender storylines which weren't executed properly but still at least happened, and then Will's eventual coming out story on Days.    After that though, it's hard to really remember a time when shows truly pushed their boundaries. I think after those landmark experiences in the mid oughts, and early tens you end up seeing less progressive story elements and social concepts being weaved as stories and brought into soaps for more traditional and route stakes for television. You see a lot of business take-over stories, love-triangles, cheating stories, who is the father, pregnancy stories and wash-rinse-repeat staples. I think in this way similar to BetterForgotten's post you just tend to look at what characters/stories seem to have a positive reaction, generate interest and just create storylines that "work" for those segments and portions of audiences. In this way I actually do think shipping is very important to soaps. It tells them they are doing "something" right and as such soaps just chase "super couples" as much as they can.    As a result head writers stop trying to tell stories and you end up just hitting the same plot points again, and again. I think soaps also fall into the trap of trying to integrate plot points with character driven stories. Everyone needs to be related or connected to the show, or else it doesn't have the meaning or impact that it needs to have on the canvas and thus with the characters in the story. However if you try to push the story to hard without the character connections and character elements then you wind up shoe-horning reactions in order to fit the "plot-based" story you need to tell which doesn't feel true or authentic.   Somewhere down the line I do think soaps just stopped trying, but I also think they feel there's too much character background and history to try to tell a meaningfully well thought out story and loop everyone in based on the heavily episodic/serialized nature of story-telling on soaps. The continuity as such just makes them stop trying. 

The rest of the movie/TV/theatre scene is filled to the brim with stories that the daily soap format would knock out of the park. Even if the ratings are low and continue to sink, they could still go out telling stories that are beyond the same old crap. What distinguishes soap opera from everything else is that they have the time to hit every single beat of every single emotion of every single story. It's time these people owned that and took it to real stories about real people again.   Budget concerns shouldn't even be an issue - they could tell great stories on the shtty sets they have. Soaps in the 50s and 60s made it work on even smaller budgets.