Superheroics

Note - if you haven't seen Iron Man 3 (and still plan on it), or read Iron Man: Extremis you may consider this post to have fairly significant spoilers.

I was talking to a co-worker about Man of Steel, and he was conjecturing that the Powers that Be in Metropolis likely had the following conversation with Superman when it was all said and done:

Thanks for helping us out. Now please leave.

One of the unanswered questions of the movie is why Superman chose to fight General Zod and his henchmen in an developed area. The body count must have been massive, and if Superman was the target, surely he could have lead them away to somewhere that the collateral damage wouldn't have included so high a human toll?

On the Marvel side of the ledger, I read the Iron Man: Extremis collected volume over the weekend. Extremis forms much of the kernel of Iron Man 3, and it left me with a question: If Maya Hansen could be the behind-the-scenes manipulator in Extremis, why was that role given to Aldrich Killian in the movie, and Hansen downgraded? While I think that it's possible to make too much of the role of the "Damsel in Distress" trope in popular culture, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to take a character who had a minor role in the source material and make him the driver of events at Hansen's expense. This strikes me as a case where a female character is deliberately downgraded by Hollywood.

I get that, for the most part, these are things that most audiences don't actively care about, and that's what makes it sort of strange. Why not have things make a bit more sense, or seem a little less stereotyped, for those people who will notice?