using your Dick Greyson example, he never really got any more "Super". He always retained the core abilties of superior agility, heightened reflexes, and such. he may have expanded on those cores through training, but there was no "He reached level 10 and got the Bad-Ass-As-Batman trait"
here's a rough outline of what we were tossing around. the game content is divided into 10 ranks. rank 1 content is average everyday folks and 10 is the Superman level content.
Players would land in a rank dependent on the background and powers selected. Say you make a Anarky or Batman type character, you'd play at the rank 4 content level - spending most of your time trouncing hoodlums and crooks while occasionally taking on supervillians.
Players would earn points to spend on their powers and skills, choosing to either buy up into higher content levels by focusing on improving themselves (refining their control over current powers, etc) or broadening their power/skill base (unlocking latent, weaker powers, learning new skills).
Say you, as a batman-esque player, really enjoy the content level you're at. You'd put your points into broadening your skill base and exploring latent abilities that you may have. You'd be more powerful by having more options at your disposal instead of simply hitting harder.
On a different tact, say you've grown bored of the level 4 content and want to spend more time fighting super villains. You spend your points to make your abilities more powerful. Maybe you refine your control so your eye lasers no longer just burn through soft targets, but can now core steel. You've become a heavier hitter and move up to rank 5, where you spend less time doing vigilante work and more time battle super villians.
This is just a really rough example of what we were working on, but it gets the gist across.
Our goal was to avoid a system where Batman is a level 14 Rogue/16 fighter or a system where heroes all had to fall along a liner chart in terms of powers. Batman is just a man with genius level intelligence and in peak physical condition who uses alot of gadgets whereas superman can fly, fire of his heat vision, freeze things with his breath, travel at super speed, and is near invulnerable. But it can be argued that Supes and bats are near equals in how "effective" they are, because Supes is kinda a one trick pony while bats is near mind boggling versatile.
Our system matched that. It placed Superman at content rank 10, but since he had focused on refining his powers he really didn't have much breadth to what he could do. Batman was at rank 5 content, but had focused himself on mastering numerous martial arts, forensic science, physchology, criminology, chemistry, etc etc ad nauseum.
