Powerless was doomed from the start. There was too much chaos around that show. It’s a bad sign when they totally ditch the original concept and quickly scrape together a new one. Originally it was going to be an insurance company that dealt with victims of superhero battles. That would have been much more interesting.
It doesn’t matter what you do in either the DC or Marvel universe because you will be destroyed and remade many times during your lifetime due to the “Secret Crisis Wars”.
PS238 has an arc dedicated to the Rainmaker Program, which trains meta-kids who have powers that are better suited for civilian use. For example, one of the kids is a transmuter who can turn anything into food, and precisely control the flavor and nutritional content. He’s training to be a chef.
On the more general topic of the thread, one of the recurring themes of the comic is the attitude of supers towards the unpowered, and how unpowered characters react to it. The unpowered son of two of the more biased supers is a frequent protagonist. (Having been forced into a school for meta-kids, he’s also frequently afraid of getting squished by accident.)
I can’t help but think that living in a Super universe would seem to everyday people very much like living under the reign of medieval kings, princes and dukes. Those guys, after all, had functional superpowers - insane wealth (pace, Batman) and the unchecked power to wage war without any need for assent from the governed, who had no say in the appointment of rulers or their removal. That was the province of other “supers”.
Fictional supers battle over power, although they self-propagandise the conflict in Manichean language, aided by the authors. But from the perspective of someone whose house is flattened or business destroyed as collateral damage, it doesn’t much matter how they badge themselves.
Similarly, medieval potentates tried to cast figleaves of justification over their actions, but we’re just accumulating power or resisting its loss. To the average punter covered in filth, the reasons of the powerful were inscrutable, just as the reasons of fictional supers are. No ordinary punter in fictional super universes has access to the privately communicated machinations and motivations of the fictional supers. The omniscient bystander perspective the audience has is not shared in-universe with the hoi-polloi. There is a vain attempt by the authors to pretend that The Masses are cheering for the Good Guys, as if from the sidelines of some sporting contest, but it is obvious that once the city-wide destruction, death and mayhem starts, no actual ordinary person would buy into that. Yet they would be impotent to do anything about it. Supers trump all forms of legitimate restraint (except where this is lampshaded, such as in The Incredibles).
To the medieval peasant, life was constantly arbitrarily interrupted by incomprehensible wars between princes of unimaginable wealth and power.
To the denizen of a fictional super universe, same-same.