Damnit. What you just wrote about Kirby and Moore is a really good counter argument. Let me mull that for a bit.
If you are interested in a contemporary comic that runs with the points you are making, then I highly recommend Zdarsky's comic Public Domain. It's one of the best metanarrative comics that takes on the business of making comics.
Speaking of Public Domain characters, I'm reading Jim Krueger and Alex Ross' Project Superpowers largely based on my love of Earth X, which I believe is the most important, and most overlooked, Marvel comic miniseries.
It's a really good story, but it is, in part, difficult to get into because I don't know the characters the way I do Marvel and DC characters, and I haven't watched how they have evolved over the decades. I'll update my thoughts when I finish it, as I have mixed feelings about IPs, and most notably Disney - we all can name at least one Disney story (not just one story from a property currently owned by Disney) that played a formative role in shaping who we are.
We are often tasked with separating the art from the artist. Is the same not also true from the art and the IP? I don't know. But I do know that I wouldn't be the person that I am today - and I probably wouldn't have taken on a career that I have shaped around the importance of storytelling - without consuming Disney stories.
Andor works as a non-Star Wars property, but placing the story inside a modern myth enriches all other Star Wars projects. And to go back to your point about The Wire, it may not exist within a superhero universe, but it is still a part of the Time Warner conglomerate. Does it's placement outside of that universe make the endeavor more noble? I don't know.