Hopeling

Well, it only makes sense for a Natural character. Or a Tech character who uses a rifle. Or a Science character, like a super-soldier. Or a mutant with a gun. Or various forms of enchanted weapons, like you said. That's only 5 possible origins.

KM has knockback in only one power, which is easily skipped anyway. Fiery, Electric, and Dark Melee are good sets. Street Justice is also nice. I don't really understand this complaint, TBH.

There is precisely one team buff which plausibly allows a brute to reach the damage cap: Fulcrum Shift. Yes, Kinetics is possibly the most popular support set around, so it's not rare to team with someone who can FS you, but it's hardly something to rely on, either. But more importantly, non-Super Strength brutes don't even reach the cap with a fully-saturated Fulcrum Shift from a defender. Even with 80 fury, which as you said was generous, they'd be at 95% from enhancements, 160% from fury, and 300% from FS, for a total of 555% damage buff, more than 100% short of the cap. A Corruptor or Controller using Fulcrum Shift would leave you even further away. And even when you have Fulcrum Shift on the team, you can't realistically assume you'll have ten stacks at all times.
But 200% +damage is plenty to cap or very nearly cap many scrapper builds. If I add another +200% damage buff to the previous Sweeping Strike example:
The Brute hits for 70.9*(1+.95+1.6+.6+2) = 436 damage.
The Scrapper hits for 106.4*1.15*(1+.95+.75+2) = 575 damage. This is WAY ahead of the brute.

So as I said, scrappers win in the presence of damage buffs. For almost any realistic buff situation, they win by quite a margin. Only if you have the double fulcrum shift needed to reach the brute cap does the brute almost catch up, and then only while you're near the buffers and fighting enough enemies to feed FS.

A brute could use red insps instead of/in addition to FS to reach the cap, but a scrapper can do the same, and do so with fewer insps at a time, meaning their tray will last longer.

This is correct. Alternately, just two boosters gets you within less than half a percent of the ED limit.

Energy Transfer does 156.4 self damage at 50. If you use it every 10 seconds, that's 15.6 hp/sec lost. That's like debuffing your own regen by 1-200%. That is not a "tiny, miniscule" loss.

Help WHO tremendously? Not the players on those servers, certainly, who are there by choice. More than once in the past, the devs gave us unlimited free transfers (for a limited time). Plus, these days we get a free server transfer every month just for being VIP, and there was a 90%-off sale on a 5-pack of transfers at Freedom launch. Not to mention how easy it is to just start over on a new server, what with cross-server email and the altitis rampant among the population. Almost everyone who doesn't want to be on a low-pop server anymore, isn't. Shutting down servers wouldn't help anyone, it only takes things away from people who specifically wanted them.

Superman's high power level is best represented by simply being high level, IMO. Unlike a video game, there's no reason a comic book setting has to have every meaningful hero at the level cap, nor have heroes only fight enemies their own level, nor, for that matter, does it need to have a level cap at all. Indeed, on the rare occasions I can think of when Superman goes against someone of his own power level, the fight often drags on for a very long time, often with neither clearly gaining the upper hand, which would suggest he (and his opponents) are tougher than they are strong.

This depends a lot on power sets. In the absence of damage buffs, yes, the scrapper advantage is minimal to nonexistent. But scrappers benefit significantly more from damage buffs - both because of their higher base damage, and because they get a larger percentage from the same powers than Brutes do.
As an example I'll use Sweeping Strike from Dual Blades. We'll give the brute 80 fury (+160% damage) this time.

Brute Sweeping Strike hits for 70.9 damage base, so you're looking at 70.9*(1+.95+1.6) = 252 damage.
Scrapper Sweeping Strike hits for 106.4 damage base, with a 15% crit chance, so you're looking at 106.4*1.15*(1+.95) = 238.6 average damage. The scrapper is a little behind.

But if I add double Blinding Feint:
Brute double Blinding Feint gives +60%. It hits for 70.9*(1+.95+1.6+.6) = 294 damage.
Scrapper double Blinding Feint gives +75%. It hits for 106.4*1.15*(1+.95+.75) = 330 average damage.

The addition of a moderate damage buff brought the scrapper from slightly behind, to well ahead. So yeah, scrappers definitely do benefit substantially more from damage buffs such as Blinding Feint, Follow Up, Against All Odds, Power Siphon, Musculature alpha, Assault, Build Up, red inspirations, or team buffs. A scrapper at the damage cap does more damage per hit than a brute at the cap, and requires less buff to get there.

The celestial wings fold down when not in flight, like a hand fan, instead of folding in the way you would expect "real" wings to. I'm not at all convinced you could simply apply the same motion to the Phoenix wings and have it look like anything you'd want to use.

This was the "fire and ice" pack, not the "hardening magma" pack.

Moreover, I'm not personally disappointed that the set lacked options for certain weapon types, both because I don't play those sets much and because I can't think of what they could have been given anyway within the theme. However, they undisputably did not receive weapon options from this pack, so I was just appending them to "only Axe is left out".

...and pistols, rifles, bows, shields...

I'm not sure which front page you're referring to, but the fateful announcement actually went up several weeks before the arc in which the events will take place. Yes, the arc isn't even out yet and they already spoilered it for us.

Exhaust ports by their very nature must usually be at least to some degree exposed, in order to emit exhaust. Engineers might be forgiven if they ended up too exposed. Military installments have a much lesser need to contain the specific rare weapons and chemicals that uniquely disable their own defenses.

If I were Emperor Cole, and I wanted to keep a bunch of pacification grenades around in case Marauder went off his leash (and it's pretty a long leash, apparently), I wouldn't store them in Marauder's own facility.

Did you? The first thing dev-Positron said was that NPC-Positron is a brilliant scientist, who built a suit that allows him to harness antimatter.

Plus, I didn't hear him say "as tough as Citadel or Statesman", just "extremely tough". It is absolutely possible for a player-built defender to become "extremely tough" at higher levels (y'know, where you could start to consider Positron as an equal). On SOs alone, a defender with Tough and an epic resist shield can easily get above 60% S/L resist all the time, and if they take Force of Nature they can cap all their resists (except Psi) for 120 seconds at a time. Many defender builds can reach the softcap to one or more defense types. Plus, they sometimes have buffs and heals in their primary that help them stay alive, or so I've heard.
But even without building for survivability, a level 50 defender using Walk can take a rocket launcher to the face and live to tell about it.

Hence "sounds". Maybe there's some percentage of uptime that would make it not overpowered, but then, if you're balancing it with a low uptime, you're trading away the "overpowered" for even more of the "boring".

The Celestial wings don't flap, either.

That sounds simultaneously really boring and really overpowered.