I think we'll just have to agree to disagree re: possible misogyny... I just don't see it, especially since the majority of the fans are female themselves. I think the obvious reason is just that they don't like love interest characters, they have the same NOPE gut reaction as I do, which has nothing to do with hating women and everything to do with shipping and the fact that most of them are probably straight so of course a cute male character with a (once) interesting personality has the potential to become much more popular than a cute female character with an interesting personality. They might still like other female characters that don't interfere with their ships, or maybe female characters in some other fandoms. I don't think anyone would mind if characters like Jody or Linda Tran got more screentime, but even if not, I don't really have a problem with SPN having a male-centric cast or fandom, it's no worse than the opposite. I love good female characters but SPN is so not the show I go looking for them, when there are so many other options to find them :>
as for writers, they could always just put a not liked character on a bus so if they choose character death instead, I think there must be another reason.

Thanks for saying that I do shipping right, I just don't see that much difference between my shipping and everyone else's shipping, except of course that I don't expect my ships to become canon. I'm not actually sure why I draw the line in the specific place I do: that I want canon to cater to me as in not having canon ships in the way, yet I get annoyed when other fans expect canon to cater to them as in making their ships actually canon. Maybe it's cause I hate all kinds of serious accusations (sexism, racism etc) and 'queerbaiting' is definitely on that list. Some fans like to throw it at the writers as an attempt to force them to write their ships into the show, as if that was ever going to happen. There are crazier fandoms (SHERLOCK), but Destiel is pretty close tbh. I just have never seen anything between them in canon so idek how anyone can get it in their minds that there's queerbaiting going on? where's the bait? Annnnd to open another can of worms, the thing called subtext used to be well liked at some point, what happened? I still belong to that old school slash shipper base that is happy to get any subtext, intentional or just up to my interpretation. The current fans are more 'all or nothing' about their ships, but making such demands to writers is not that smart cause if those are the options, almost every writer chooses nothing, so I'd just prefer to enjoy my 'queerbaity' subtext in peace. And for this reason I think I'm very much doing shipping 'wrong' :S