I always figured that was kind of the point of the whole story, and what makes him genre-savvy. He's literally the only person in all of comic-book land that sees technology and enhancements that are replicable for mass consumption not being used for the general public, and then striving to make it so. This hasn't been a straight path, there's been no "zero downsides pushing others into obsolescence" situation, and Zoat has been implying heavily there will be repercussions from this event.
I've always considered better to just assume there's a reason things aren't that easy rather than that the protagonist is smarter than an entire planet.
Noooot exactly. Once you've changed the structures of their brain, their genetics and their thought patterns, how are they still the same person?
You're far too attached to the idea that changing a person is inherently negative. From the second to second we're not quite the same person that we were before, even if the change is done over a year rather than an instant you still wouldn't be the same person you were before. To see if a change is negative you have to look at if you'd rather be that way or not.
A change in genetic or even brain structure means nothing, it's the final result which should be looked at (the thought pattern change), in the case of a Kryptonian you'd basically be adding brain power mostly, Superman existence proves that their morality can work just like humans so it's not like you'd have to fear that your moral compass would change.
Also it's kinda hypocritical for the SI to act like he's against his thought pattern being changed, in fact there's downright some cognitive dissonance there. From the get go he was ready to lose his sanity for the chance at power when given an orange ring, even when he saw that it was affecting him his first choice was to decide that he'd try to be the productive kind of insane, rather than being petrified with fear at how his mind was changing. For someone who's so unwilling to change his amygdala to peak human, because he's afraid of changing himself it makes little sense, ironically he was a-ok with turning off his testosterone, something which has far reaching consequences for the mind far behind just attraction.
To add to the disconnect he had a spiel about how someone should be ready in case their power ring were out of order and trained with a ranged weapon to compensate, yet his ring has the equivalent of Panacea powers 2.0, heck 3.0 when you consider he's not limited by base material, his power ring database being full of alien physiology and how it can do extreme finesse on a massive scale. Yet he didn't bother improving his shitty human body. I'm not even talking about changing the aesthetics for function here, just making himself better on a structural level by upgrading what's already there for something better.
I get why he didn't just himself kryptonian narratively speaking, but you can only justify him being so unwilling to better himself up to a point and his position on some matters really point toward a large cognitive dissonance on what's acceptable to change and what's not.
