@davesaddiction there's a lot of logic to this, I think GM only bought Saab in the first place as kind-of a poorly thought through impulse buy. Cadillac's customer base was aging, Boomers weren't interested in domestic-style luxury, but were going crazy for upscale imports, and they decided buying an upscale import brand was the best way to deal with the situation, and Saab was what was available when they went shopping. It was always too much of a lower volume niche brand than what they really wanted, but I think they thought that given enough time, the right marketing, a big enough budget, Saab could eventually be grown into a viable BMW and Audi competitor
Ford had the same issue going on with Lincoln and bought Jaguar.
Saturn was a lasting monument to Roger Smith's attempt at radically transforming GM in the 1980s, and, like most of his initiatives, never really worked out all that well. The division only turned a full-year profit once, in the mid '90s, which was also when its sales and market share peaked. And they had one model line at the time, which means the more Saturn broadened its range, the more models they sold, the less profitable they were, which is not a good basis for a sustainable business.
The S-Series development program started out in the '80s as a new Chevrolet compact, before Smith decided to spin it off into a whole new division for reasons. It really should have been a Chevy Saturn from the beginning.
Pontiac seemed to finally be getting its product strategy in order during the 2000s, but GM just ran out of time. Had they made the same moves 10 years earlier, it probably would have survived