Marvel’s Luke Cage has superhuman strength and bulletproof, unbreakable skin, and that’s way too overpowered to be a “street-level” hero. What makes characters like Spider-Man and Daredevil “fun” is the fact that they are vigilantes who can be hurt; they can be shot or stabbed, and their friends worry about them because they aren’t indestructible. But when you have a character that’s indestructible, then all that danger goes away. Also normal thugs aren’t a threat to you.
The only thing keeping Luke Cage from approaching Thor/Superman levels of OP is that he doesn’t really have a movement power. At best he can run really fast or jump really far, but he’s too conscientious to go launching himself all over the city like the Hulk. If he landed on somebody (or their car or whatever) he’d feel pretty bad about it, so it’s not really an option unless he’s in the middle of nowhere.
I don’t think his strength is within an order of magnitude of theirs. I don’t think his durability is either.
Granted, I wouldn’t be surprised if you showed me a comic showing otherwise. There’s probably a comic where he goes inside a star or something stupid, because there are always those kinds of writers. But based on his typical portrayal, I think he’s more of a brush off a car crash and pick it up guy than a survive a nuke and crush coal into diamonds guy.
I’m not a marvel-head, so I can’t rightly weigh in on much of this, but this kind of reads like an argument in favor of OP’s thesis. His mindset/power combo seems like it’d be better suited to work that isn’t set in high population/low space environments.
When people say “street-level hero”, what they typically mean is a hero who doesn’t have strong enough powers to be in the big leagues, think “fighting crime” rather than “fighting alien invaders/gods/interdimensional beings”
That explains the confusion on my end. Appreciated!
He’s been on the Avengers, so he must have been in instances to let loose.