Also, it kinda sounds - and here I do exaggerate - like you are depicting the other side as "I want to play Spider-Man but suffer none of the flaws or consequences. It's just as Uncle Ben said, 'With great power comes great...' You know what? Screw that, and give me back that symbiote suit. I was ways more powerful that way. It's a clear upgrade on the stats, and I don't have to reload my webs. Score."
It's not always an exaggeration, based on a few players I've met over the years.
I don't think that the late/end game character is necessarily what my players have in mind here. Since we have been talking about Spider-Man, let's stick with that and superheroes for a second. If we were playing a supers game, they would likely have a basic power set in mind for playing Spider-Man. But the issue would be akin to leveling three levels as a mundane Peter Parker high school dork before getting your Spider-Man of "spider-sense" and maybe wall-crawling, but then having to wait another four levels before you unlock your web-slinging, and then another set of levels before you get your super physique. Sure, superheroes power-up/level, but most heroes start out with their set of powers realized. And most people wanting to a Spider-Man-esque character - maybe an off-brand character called the "The Bug" - would want to jump into that character concept right away rather than slog through months of play before they can play the character concept they had in mind. For some of my players in D&D 5E, they may have to wait until level 3 or later - depending on archetype features or sufficient multiclassing - before they get what they consider the core of their character concept realized. The "process of getting there" can come across as a begrudging tax rather than an exciting feature, and I don't think that this makes them bad players for wanting to play what they actually have in mind for their character as soon as possible and being disappointed with that "process." In contrast, there are other games where players can jump right in at "level 0" with their realized character concepts and basic suite of features for that concept.
Thing is, a supers game (i.e. a milieu where Spiderman would make sense) kind of expects you to have your superpowers - or most of them - right out of the gate. Which is fine, as long as it's made clear that "mechanical" development and growth of the character over the campaign is likely to be near zero. To me it'd be like starting a D&D game with 20th level characters, where the game system caps at 21st.
The only other real option is - and here Spidey is a good example - to start as Peter Parker and play out the origin story. In this case there will certainly be "mechanical" growth to the character but it'll all kind of happen in one great big whack - you either have superpowers or you don't. But it'd be tricky trying to play out the origin stories of a bunch of supers all together in one party, I guess. In D&D terms you'd go from 1st level to 15th level in one fell swoop, skipping all the ones in between.
Maybe this is part of why supers games have never interested me in the slightest. That, and superheroes just don't realistically fit into the world no matter how hard you try; I find this jarring in the Marvel movies sometimes as well.
A low or even mid-level D&D character, however - particularly a non-caster - *can* realistically fit in to its ordinary game world just fine; even more so in a system like 1e or 5e where the by-level power curve isn't as steep. You can play an ordinary Joe who just happens to be really good at what he does (fighting, sneaking, tracking, persuading, whatevs) and take it from there, watching him develop both mechanically* and as a character. And you also get to play through all the intervening steps rather than jump straight from 'nobody' to 'superhero'.
* - and even this isn't important beyond the very basics e.g. added hit points and baked-in class abilities.
So back to character concept: on the uncommon occasions where I put any thought into a character before rolling it up, I might have an end ideal for what that character could become at high level but I'm fully aware that a) in-game events can and likely will change that ideal significantly; b) the chances of the character surviving** long enough to reach that ideal state are low to zero; and c) what seems workable in my mind might not be at all workable once play begins.
** - including both in-game survival (the usual character death bit) and meta-survival (does playing this character cross my boredom threshold).
Lanefan