I offer a compromise:
both ideas sound bad. For a series like this to work, it needs to be able to show the world's super heroes, and really take the piss out of them, much like
Mystery Men works by both showing and spoofing Captain Amazing and Casanova Frankenstein while foregrounding its underdog protagonists.
Well, the original pilot did feature the minor hero Crimson Fox, although with a totally different costume and power set than the comics' version. The big guns like Superman and Wonder Woman would have to be off-camera, but DC's got dozens of obscure characters that the Arrowverse hasn't turned into series regulars yet. So in either version, it would've been a mix of minor characters that DC cleared for on-camera use and more famous characters that stayed off-camera and were only talked about.
And I think there's something to be said for an approach that keeps the main characters at a remove from the hero community and just shows the ground-level impact of it. It's like
Marvels -- the viewpoint character was often on the periphery of events involving the big heroes, but he had little direct contact with them. Heck, it's sort of like
Agents of SHIELD was in season 1, when it was mainly about non-powered government agents dealing with side stories and bits of aftermath from the movies.
I mean, really, that's the whole appeal of a story like this, if it's done well. We've seen countless stories where the heroes are front and center, so getting to see what it'd be like to be an ordinary civilian in a world of gods and monsters is an interestingly different perspective. That's one of the few things I liked about the Uma Thurman comedy
My Super Ex-Girlfriend. It was a dumb movie, but I loved the idea of it -- a romantic comedy that just happened to be in a universe where superheroes are a thing, and that was told from the perspective of a normal guy within such a universe.
