I'm not super familiar with all of these, but let me take a quick stab at them
Jotun vs the Aesir: Many of the Jotuns WERE more powerful than some of the gods. They weren't more powerful than Thor in a direct fight, but Idun was a goddess and certainly not more powerful than the Jotuns that fought Thor. Also, the most famous story I know of Thor and Loki's adventures together involve them going to a Jotun's castle, where they are bamboozled with illusions repeatedly. The Aesir are physically powerful, but the Jotuns are their match mystically, is the general sense I have gotten. But, again, I'm not super familiar with all the details of Norse mythology, but there seems to be plenty of wiggle room.
Indian Mythos I'm not super familiar with. Do you mean Hinduism? Hinduism has many legends of the Deva's being opposed by the Asura. There are of course greater powers above them, but it is certainly an equal struggle up until the highest points of Nirvana, and the Deva's FAR outnumber the Asura. And, additionally, it gets odd sometimes. For example, the Goddess Durga was created by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva along with a host of "lesser gods" to defeat a single Demon, the Bull Demon Mahisasura. Which indicates that that demon was at least as powerful as a single god, because it took a bunch of them pooling their power to create a new deity to defeat him. I'm certainly not a scholar of Hinduism though, so my understanding could be coming from a compilation of stories from different regions and time periods.
South American mythology I'm not familiar with... but you straight up refute your own point. "you placate the gods to make them not do evil" In that case... the gods are not more powerful but less numerous than the evils, the gods ARE the evils. And, depending on the culture such as the Aztecs, there are evils stronger than a single god. The being that makes up the Earth for example took the five strongest gods to defeat.
I'm not terribly familiar with the Assyrian or Babylonian myths, but I do want to follow a thread from South America by looking towards Egypt. In Egypt you have the serpent that is planning on destroying the world, and sometimes the Serpent is held at bay by only Ra and other times they are held at bay by a team up of the Gods.
And I think this ties into the larger metatextuality of the situation. Many of the stories have the Gods as the heroes and protagonists. So, sometimes they face "an uncountable horde" that their amazing powers get them through, other times they are faced with a single foe of equal power, and sometimes they get defeated and are forced to team up with other gods. There are many tropes involved in mythology.
And, for another point, The Monkey King from Journey to the West is technically a Demon (along with a dozen other things, ah, Monkey.) And there are gods he just punks without effort (The Jade Emperor). Other Demons he can defeat easily, some he can't. Other divine beings like the Buddha are far beyond him. It isn't clear cut that Gods = more powerful.
I don't understand what you are trying to say here.
Hmm, question the role of evil gods... like this thread and the previous thread did?
With all of this talk happening about the various peoples of D&D and whether they are inherently evil and is it due to their gods they worship and so on... it made me take a look at the gods themselves. And I realized that having a pantheon that includes "evil" gods seems to intrude and trod...
www.enworld.org
Again, I'm not going to disagree with the history of DnD, we both know what the history is. I'm disagreeing that it was the best solution.