Thanks again for the great conversation, everyone. There are some great ideas and plans being exchanged here.
It seems like one of the recurring issues is damage, specific having cosmic damage without obliterating everything. This is essentially a case of making the damage in the game match the way damage is handled in four-color comics, ie. supers can smack each other around without causing a massive body count, either from killing one another or causing massive collateral damage. It occurs to me that this is an issue that might be best handled as a genre convention, a narrative, universal aspect of the setting that costs no points. Given that, the best solution might be to adopt a "killing attacks must be declared" convention, the kind found in M&M, Blood of Heroes, even as an optional rule in GURPS Supers. This means that no matter what damage the character inflicts on a target (whether the target is super or civilian), the worst that will happen to the target is unconsciousness, broken bones, or other nasty but non-lethal injuries. This could be explained any number of ways: the heroes pulled punches (or rolled with impact when attacked), the civilians got lucky or were saved by the heroes' timely intervention, whatever fits. If the character or NPC wants to attack with lethal force and kill someone, they have to declare their intention to kill the target, with all the attendant physical and roleplaying consequences. It's unrealistic, but is an established convention of the genre. It also allows for knock-down, drag out, high-destruction fights without leaving the setting an inadvertent bloodbath...unless that's exactly what the character (or Big Bad) wants, at which point the sheer horror of this level of power becomes apparent. And, if I ever run a game of gritty superhumans, reverting back to the standard damage rules (or something closer to vanilla rules) would make a great point of contrast for a different sort of game.
It won't please everyone, but it would satisfy me in a four-color/cosmic superhero game I would run. And it doesn't require nerfing the characters or powers. And as for why I wouldn't just use a different game, BRP/Superworld offers a slew of features I love that aren't found in other games, on top of the great utility of this great system.