Magneto the headmaster wuss?

A thought occurred to me today while thinking about Magneto's relationship
with Lee Forrester.

Many fans (myself included) think that, while the *characterization* of
Magneto while he was with the X-Men and/or headmaster of the New Mutants
was very good, his actual powers were handled badly (yes, Claremont
handling Magneto badly... shocking, I know.) He was, basically, a wuss. He
needed to be rescued by Rogue in UXM #196 when the psi-scream went off and
Rachel threw him and Xavier out the window (the kind of thing he can
usually save himself from, otherwise he'd probably be a smear on the wall
of some secret base by now), did pretty much *nothing* useful to protect
himself in UXM #199 (come on-- Spiral wears metal armor!), got his clock
cleaned by Fenris in UXM #200, got taken out by a Sentinel from the future
in UXM #202... the list goes on. Plus, he didn't go with the X-Men into
various situations where he'd have been awfully useful, thus begging the
question of exactly how much of an X-Man he was.

However, I realized today there's a simple reason for all that.

He was hurt.

We know he was massively injured when Warlock destroyed Asteroid M, and
while it *looked* like he had no worse than a broken arm at the point where
Lee took him back to the base in the Bermuda Triangle, we know he was
incapable of using his powers at all then. It seems that Magneto suffered
serious damage *to his powers*, so that even when he *seemed* physically
healed, he was still weak. Perhaps whatever organ or subsystem or network
within his body generates magnetic energy was burnt out by his attempt to
save himself from an object traveling at near-lightspeed slamming into him
and then trying to protect himself on the fall to Earth.  We saw him
straining to lift a big statue (the implication there being that he
*should* be able to do it easily, and he was pushing himself to do it now
to prove to himself that he could), just before he went to fight the
Beyonder, and that was right before he joined the X-Men.

Of course, he never said on panel that he was still weak after that. But
let's face it, it would have been bad writing (though consistent with
Claremont's flaws) if he had. Magneto does not whine about his problems. I
could easily see him privately taking Storm (or Xavier, or both, depending
on if this was before or after the trial or if he told them separately)
aside and telling them that, while he has decided to try it their way and
he would be honored to fight alongside the X-Men, they should not expect
him to be the powerhouse who bails them out of trouble as he'd been on the
Beyonder's battleworld, since he's recovering from injuries and his powers
are nowhere near full strength right now. Either of them would have
respected Magneto's desire to keep this somewhat quiet. But he's unlikely
to have told the rest of the X-Men, so he would hardly be talking about it
in public a lot, thus explaining why Chris "Exposition" Claremont never
actually had him explain this. That's part of why Magneto got left out of
several major X-Men expeditions-- he *was* needed to protect the kids,
true, and he does have the best-suited powers to protecting a houseful of
people at the same time, but he was also not at full strength and Storm
might have figured it was better to keep him in reserve in case they really
needed him rather than burn him out up front.