Every single model Oldmobile sold in its waning years was on a platform that was either shared with a model in another GM brand, or had originally been shared with another GM brand. (The only one that wasn’t currently shared was the Aurora, since it continued longer than its platform-mate the Buick Regal.)
Some of those cars were in fact good. Generally speaking, every W-platform car GM has made has had competitive reliability, good ergonomics, and credible handling.
Some of these cars were not good.
http://www.carsurvey.org/reviews/oldsmobile/alero/2003/
There’s your reliable post-99 Oldsmobile.
Oh, and it isn’t euthanasia unless death is in fact preferable to the alternative. That’s kind of implicit in the “eu” prefix.
Nothing that happened before the last few generations of Oldsmobiles had anything at all to do with its demise, or gave it any chance of survival. I mean look at your list. By the time it was killed, the buyers Oldsmobile was trying to court hadn’t even been born when the last of those occurred.
What you’re doing in talking up Oldsmobile, particularly post-70s Oldsmobile, is falling right into the trap in which GM was hoping to catch you. Loving the brand rather than the cars. Letting the brand cover up the deficiencies of the crappy cars sold under it, while you focus only on the good ones. Thinking of GM (and Ford and Chrysler) cars in terms of brands tells you nothing about which cars are likely to be reliable and which are going to be dogs, because all of the brands encompass both irredeemable crap and worthy competitors. The only way to meaningfully discuss American badge-engineered cars is to do so in terms of platforms. “F-body,” “B-body,” “W-body,” “A-Body,” “Fox Body,” “Panther Platform,” “MN12.” (Those being some of the good ones.) They’ve got you looking at the rows when you should be looking at the columns. They’re using your sentimental attachment to the rows to blind you to the columns.
That may not really be the intent, but it’s the effect. And while in your case it works to their favor, for those who didn’t grow up knowing Oldsmobiles (back when they were actually distinct from other GM brands) were their own kind of great, there was no sentimental attachment to work with. The same obfuscation of platforms meant that the Intrigue (W-body = good) was getting painted with the same brush as the Alero (N-body = bad).
Q: What do you get when you mix a spoon full of crap into a barrel full of ice cream?
A: A barrel full of crap.
Olds was the first casualty of this process, but it managed to infect every GM brand and the company as a whole. Meanwhile, Honda and Toyota, while they did engage in some badge engineering, kept their brands more distinct from one another, and more importantly didn’t try to mix in crap with their ice cream.
edit: Everything in this post also applies to Saab, except the time frames for innovation (if you want to call “weird for the sake of weird” innovation, in Saab’s case) is shorter.