The decoy protagonist was so well loved to the point that he was around for less than a 3rd of the series and he's not only a lot of people's favorite character in the series, but most of anime period.
Also shit, this is a hard topic to cover. Just mentioning the series is prolly a spoiler since there's only but so many protagonists in a series. ._.
a part of me wishes kamina didn't die but he had to for Simon to develop