Would you care to ennumerate the problems you noticed with Man of Steel, and the problems you had with Avengers? I am curious and would like to have an exchange of views on these topics.
Avenger's problems are more narrative-structural, and hence pervasive, than Man of Steel.
Avengers attempted to portray the heroes overcoming a series of challenges, but the uneven nature of this road and some poor directorial choices, plus I suspect a misunderstanding of the Marvel vs. DC dynamic, resulted in the movie having trouble letting its heroes actually be heroic. These are the Avengers. They fight gods on a regular basis. The worst stuff in the universe sees them coming and screams "Game over man, game over!" and jumps off the thirty-fifth floor to get away.
We all came to see
that, you can build up to it all you want, you can have trouble putting the team together, getting it to work as a team, but you get the Avengers together with their game faces on and it's time for evil to flail impotently and whine. Avengers the movie did not understand this, deciding even at the end with the nuke inbound to try and raise the tension once more by having them get overwhelmed, long after anyone should be trying to raise dramatic tension. That's the worst part on this issue, but if you work back through the movie you can find others.
I tend to think that Luis' and your take on the issue of violence en masse vs. personal violence is somewhat wrongheaded. Everyone I've spoken to on the issue acknowledges that a lot of people are dying here got to them on an emotional level, and more than one has expressed surprise that carnage, implied or not, on this scale actually got past the ratings types. So I think this idea that anyone "needed" to see the apocalypse play out on a personal scale here isn't terribly valid on an emotional level for this movie. (It's certainly not on the same storytelling and wanted-got levels I talked about with Avengers.)
My issues with Man of Steel are smaller-scale and almost de rigour to Superman anyways, like the good old "immune to bullets is immune to physics" one where nobody flinches when taking multiple GAU-8 rounds but a train engine at a much lower velocity sends them flying. The forces involved probably aren't equivalent, but they're close enough reactions should be noticeable. The only one I think most of us would have noticed in the act was "why did Zod discard his battle armor anyways".
