If you're trying to say that Man of Steel wasn't a throw back, I mean come on, Krypton was deterministic and hopeless, Zod was a genocidal maniac who Superman kills at the end and Clark Kent is a world-traveler who's already thirty by the time he first puts on the cape. That's pretty much all right out of John Byrne's run from the late 80s.
The reason I consider the urban centers to be mostly evacuated is because there aren't a whole lot of people where Superman and Zod are fighting. If there were, Zod would go for them to kill them specifically every single time, like he did in the train station.
Personally, I never asked myself whether Man of Steel was good or not leaving the theater. I loved it. Saw it twice. I didn't think that any aspect of the movie conveyed that Superman was a broken concept. Maybe that the secret identity was a broken concept since Lois pretty much immediately figures out that Clark Kent is the Superman, but Superman in general?
"I can do things other people can't" "[not helping people] isn't an option for you" "Are you okay?" "This man is not our enemy" Superman?
I felt his character was pretty spot-on. It genuinely surprised me that so many people found reasons to hate it. Some of those reasons are legitimate. The movie wasn't as good as it could have been. Superman could have been shown trying to get the fight away from the city more consistently, or shown to be deliberately trying to move the fight through places without many people. Instead, they fly into space once and it just so happens that nowhere they fight has many people in it.
You're not wrong that I mentally add details to the story to enhance my enjoyment. I did it with Man of Steel and with Star Trek and not really with the Star Wars prequels as much as some people do, though I'll never say anything bad about their Obi-Wan. And I don't feel bad about it or feel like I'm rose-lensing the movies too bad in comparison to other people, because the true believers never question whether the original Star Wars films are good or if they just like them because they were a special effects spectacle with a simple plot in an age where you didn't get that every time a blockbuster came out. Nobody ever seems to ask whether Superman I or Superman II are good, even though the portrayal of both Lois and Superman is significantly worse than in Man of Steel, because of how charming those films are. Well Man of Steel wasn't supposed to be charming, it was meant to be awesome, and as far as I have ever been concerned, it is.