Oh boy! I get to be Debbie Downer!
Nova is a title I bought new off the rack and I never cared for it very much. As Ken said, it was fairly standard and generic, and made in the mold of Spider-Man. (Just what we needed with 3 separate Spider-Man titles a month.) By the time the series ended I was barely reading it and just buying because it was a title I collected. In terms of art, I think batman_fan might be misremembering. The Sal Buscema/Tom Palmer duo was only on an issue or two. Mostly it was Sal with Giacoia or Sinnott inks. I like Sal, but this was the period where he was churning out what seemed like a dozen books a month and I found the results pretty rote and dull. Carmine Infantino took over around #15, with mostly Tom Palmer inks until the end of the run, but that still wasn't enough to pique my interest.