To the extent your argument is that these are Clark Kent stories more than Superman stories, to my mind there's no distinction. I'm 100 percent on board with, "Superman is what I can do. Clark is who I am." So focusing on Clark in no way deligitimizes a Superman story to me. Quite the contrary.
I'm not talking about legitimacy, I'm responding to your statement about whether the stories treated Superman as a problem, which I took to mean whether their creators saw the narrative concept of a pure, noble superhero as a problem that needed to be solved to make the story work for a contemporary audience, rather than something to be taken at face value and presented uncritically. The creators of
Lois & Clark and
Smallville both absolutely saw Superman and his associated tropes as a problem to be worked around and avoided as much as possible. When Deborah Joy Levine developed L&C, her initial idea was never to show Superman at all, just to do a workplace comedy/drama about Lois & Clark, with Superman as a background element that was discussed but never seen. They abandoned that, of course, but as I said, season 1 tried to downplay the superhero side as much as possible.
In both cases, the creators definitely saw Superman as a problem, and their solution (in the original conceptions of both series, regardless of how they changed in later seasons) was to focus as much as possible on Clark Kent instead of Superman. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar even took
Smallville to the point that Levine was unable to with L&C, effectively eliminating the superhero element and turning Clark Kent's story into a paranormal teen drama.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think you can reduce something's success or failure to a single causal factor -- "The things that did this failed and the ones that didn't succeeded." Winning over an audience, or telling a good story (not necessarily the same thing), involves a lot more variables than that. Personally, I never much liked
Smallville's avoidance of Superman, especially as it just dragged on year after year, but the show had enough other aspects that made it work for the audience, and that made it mostly work for me in the first few seasons and again in seasons 8-9. And I wasn't crazy about L&C's first-season avoidance of Superman either, but it was still a fun and engaging show in other ways. And when it did embrace Superman more in subsequent seasons, that didn't translate to a better show in and of itself, because it wasn't the only factor. Season 2 was good, but seasons 3 & 4 were from showrunners who didn't respect the concept and approached it as camp, so those seasons just got dumber and dumber.
So the issue with the movies is not that they treat Superman as a problem to be solved. Addressing problematical concepts can be the root of a lot of excellent storytelling. The issue is that they don't come up with effective solutions, or that they have other weaknesses independent of that single question.
Was Donner going to continue to use that scene when time was turned back? I'm trying to remember if it was in the Donner Cut which I haven't watched in fifteen years, but if it had been in there it wouldn't have made any sense at all.
It is in the Donner Cut, and that's my biggest problem with the Donner Cut. The decision to end the first film with the time reversal was made before the second film was shot, so if Donner had completed S2, it would have had a different ending. So putting that sequence at the end of the Donner Cut is betraying its intention to approximate what Donner's version of the film would have been.
