I feel that, if anything, the comic gradually shifted away from a big, epic narrative to a more slice of weird, magical life type of story. We still get big arcs with fights and clear villains, and there is an overarching narrative, but consider how many pages have been devoted to, for example, Susan's conflicting feelings about Diane and Raven, or Elliot coming to terms with his gender identity and transformation forms.

Noah was introduced back when Dan was writing a different story, one that looked like it was barreling fast towards epic conclusions. His introduction as a super-duper special guy is almost concurrent with Lord Tedd, a character Dan has explicitly said he regrets having introduced before the time was right.