I think that may make a huge difference actually. I prefer to read most of Bendis' work in trade because his pacing often just doesn't suit monthly comics. I don't get too worked up about "decompression" generally but certain writing styles suit certain formats better.

Getting back to Ultimate Power, if you break it down into individual issues, you'll see not a great deal happens in each one.

Also a lot of the criticism I read for the series occurred while it was ongoing. So the significant events you mentioned hadn't happened. In fact to make matters even worse due to scheduling problems we were getting obscure references to a certain person being missing without knowing why he would be and similarly Ultimate Power seemed to be referencing events in Ultimates 3 which hadn't been released. Trade reading would probably solve most of these problems.

And yes the was a cool moment.