Claremont's the king. While he may not have built them out of nothing, he was definitely the writer to first make the X-men truly great. I still think his work from '79-'86 beats any other X-men run for original ideas, character development, and development of the major themes that define the concept of the book. Stories like Proteus, Days of Future Past, God Loves/Man Kills, anything with the Morlocks, the Hellfire Club, Nimrod, Mystique's Brotherhood, The Trial of Magneto, The Mutant Massacre, the original Genosha story were all instant classics that still feel definitive today.
It could be said that his later work seemed far less focused, it could even be argued that he actually wrote more mediocre to bad X-men comics than anyone else, given how long (and how many times) he wrote the characters; but I'd still argue that he wrote more really great classic stories than anyone else too.
Joss Whedon, on the other hand never wrote a bad issue of X-men, his were all great, but he did only write like 25 issues. And, yeah, they are all great, but even he seems to understand that he's essentially doing an homage to the work of Claremont and Morrison.
Grant Morrison probably did just as many great issues as Whedon, even if he did do a lot more that weren't all that great, but I think, overall, he probably added a lot more to the story than most X-men writers have.
I'll always like the years the main books were done by Fabian Nicieza and Scott Loddell, overall; but in retrospect it didn't always feel like they had the freedom to really let the characters develop very much between events, a dilemma still faced by a lot of writers today, it seems.
There's a bunch of current X-men writers that interest me now, too (most of them, actually), but I still feel it's too early for me to judge those guys in comparison to the others I like, given that they're not finished yet.
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