Was I wrong about Champions being the place to go?

[Logan Darklighter]

Never got into the mechanics of the game much. I know from other friends that it's at its best with street-level supers, and martial arts types. It apparently isn't as good at say, Golden Age superheroes or anything in that venue.

The pen and paper books differentiate between the game mechanics - called the Hero system - and the actual world background. The genre book for the Hero System supers world is called Champions.
The Hero System game mechanics very much are capable of doing justice any power level you want to play. From street level heroes to golden and silver age powerhouses all the way up to galactic scale superheroics (Like Legion of Superheroes - which is kinda both silver age and galactic at the same time.) It's all in how high a point total the game master allows and the way the points are spent for characteristics, powers and skills. I've both played and GMed Champions. The character generation system is complex. But the actual game mechanics are pretty simple.

I also recall being told that the point system breaks down if you're not careful. One person built a common housefly and it apparently cost something like 500+ points, because of all the levels of size reduction it had to have.
Edit: I also recall being told once of a guy who built a character using only default points, who had a power which was guaranteed to destroy the whole planet. He gimped and psych-lim'ed himself with as many penalties as he could fit on the character, but by the time he was finished, he had a power he could use once, which would end all life on Earth.

The former I've not heard of. But there are probably more efficient ways of allocating the points for the shrinking. One of the things that the Hero System beastiary has done in regards to insects is to build swarms of them as a single diffuse "character" instead of trying to stat out the individual bugs. 

As for your second example - this was a specific case of a character that COULD be built. It was actually used in the game book as an example for the writers of the Hero System to say to GMs - DO NOT ALLOW THIS!!   ^_^