>Iron Man has mostly unimpressive foes, ITT we come up with ideas for Iron Man villains for him to actually fight
See, this is the big issue with Iron Man. You keep having people look at his rogues gallery and instead of saying, "Hey, maybe we should focus on revitalizing what's already here and putting them to good use," you always get people dismissing 99% of them and saying, "Hey, let's make new villains for him to actually fight!"
This has been happening in almost every Iron Man run in the past decade. A new writer comes in, does one, maybe two storylines with a few already established Iron Man villains at most, but mostly focuses on brand new villains they came up with for him to fight. But, the thing is, these new villains are usually even more stale and unmemorable than the classic ones.
Try to think of Iron Man villains from the past decade. You have Ezekial Stane, who hasn't shown up in anything since Fraction's run ended. In the grand scheme of things, he didn't feel that memorable either.
Or the current run of Iron Man under Bendis. He said repeatedly in interviews when he first got started that Iron Man's rogue gallery was lame outside of one or two characters and that the rest are literally who's--and his solution was to make brand new exciting enemies for him to fight.
Then he proceeded to have Tony fight a bunch of generic ninjas that felt like Hand knockoffs before having Tony fight against Carol for no good reason and get put into a coma.
Iron Man: Armored Adventures went in some pretty weird directions that left a lot of people divided thanks to the whole "Tony, Rhodey and Pepper as teenagers" route it went with, but one thing most people can agree on is that it breathed new life into Iron Man's classic rogue gallery. These characters that already exist have a lot of potential, if anyone bothered to use them.
My point is, why spend so much time trying to reinvent the wheel when you have a large set of characters to work with?