My preference is for a character not "owned" by any poster. This is what I tried to do with Miss X, a character who was originally simply a name carried over from the old universe. I fleshed her out and made her distinct from her original prototype, Malvana, and made her "mysterious" so that her personality -- or lack thereof -- could be easily written by any writer. Some posters have used her in her function as a business administrator and fixer of bureaucratic problems, while other posters really hate her for some reason and are convinced she has some kind of evil hidden agenda. In the end, she was brought in to fill a void and to be a group-owned character that no one of us has control over.
If we go with another character, therefore, I don't think it should be a character closely connected with any one poster, as Grissom is with Chewy.
It might be time to simply ditch the idea of a "Maxwell Lord" type and go back to direct democracy, where the group makes its decisions collectively. Now that they're bankrupt -- for the second time, I might add -- it seems like a good time for the business end of things to wither away (not that it ever really existed except in prologues and epilogues) and for the team to simply do adventures as they come along. In practice we've been doing that already, so the pretense of the team being a "company" that I came up with in issue #6 might just be an idea whose time has passed. The team is already an adventure/superhero team -- we should just continue on that track and forget about the company/business side of it. Especially since the Vanguard Europe guys seem to have a pretty good handle on that. Van-Int'l are heroes, first and foremost, as much as I hate to admit it -- that's the way we've chosen to write them, and that's the way they work best. So let's concentrate on those strengths and thus concentrate on the team rather than the company/support staff/et cetera...
