It's definitely a good thing that they didn't kill off the icons. I'm sure at some point further down the road, some or all of the icons will make some sort of an appearance at HHN again. It's likely that the next few years will be original and won't feature any of the icons, but they'll probably end up coming back in some form sometime. If they killed them off, it would have made bringing them back more difficult to do, as it would mess up the timeline. Then again, most of the icons are considered to be dead anyway, now that I think about it...