It's an overused tactic to be sure. I would be interested in seeing characters die and stay dead. Create new characters to replace them. Move things forward instead of the constantly repeating loop we have now. I understand that the most iconic characters can't just be killed off the way things are now. But that's mainly because there's no other icon to replace them. Fresh characters and life cycles that actually mean something would make comics much more alive.
In no particular order, Time Manipulation, Telepahy and Super-Intellect are the best ones to have on their own and likely the only ones that would work on their own. The others, if you think about it, wouldn't work on their own. Flight, for example, without some sort of invulnerability and/or super breathing would mean you couldn't really survive at high altitudes. Speed would have similar issues. There's a reason strength is usually coupled with some level of invulnerability too. You could be super strong, but lift a car over your head and you're likely to shatter your elbows, shoulders, etc.
I think what happens is that Superman himself is so iconic that in most writer's hands he becomes unrelatable. What is interesting is his existence and how it affects everything else, not so much him. At the end of the day, his story has essentially been told already, many times. DC won't and, really, can't, allow for the character to change in regular continuity in any real way, and change is what drives character. So, (again, this is generalizing) for the most part, any book with Superman in it, will wind up being boring. Obviously, Elseworlds is a huge exception to this. Having said all this, and while I am loving the Lex run, Lex almost has the same problem because he's just as iconic. But DC always takes many more liberties with their villains in regular continuity.
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