I’m kinda interested to know on what tier you would place the Post Crisis and Rebirth Heralds.
I think they usually cap out at planetary or star level. For instance, prior to the upgrade we had them all at Solar System level due to a single statement about Alan Scott having a power source that could wipe out the solar system. I didn't think this was a good basis, as it was just the lone statement and it's questionable whether Alan's individual fighting prowess scales directly to the explosive energy within him, or if the statement was even accurate. I thought it was a pretty good example of an outlier, but we had 30+ profiles all chain-scaling to that one single statement.
But that was the only actual star level evidence we had. The vast majority of the time these character are fighting at city or mountain level, and when they get very serious it can get planetary. The complete absence of any real feats between Planet and Universal (nothing galaxy level, almost nothing star level) to me is one of the strongest indications that these characters are nowhere near universal. It renders most of the storylines somewhat nonsensical to think of the characters as being capable of that.
The usual response to this is "something something varies" but this needs to have some grounded limitations. It isn't as though these fights don't matter to the Justice League, it's often life or death or has huge stakes, so in order for this to be true we'd have to think that in the vast majority of circumstances (like, 10,000 to 1 in terms of frequency) members of the Justice League that scale are using an infinitesimal fraction of their power even in life or death circumstances, that somehow they have never portrayed any genuine galaxy or star level feats (just a lone statement of questionable validity) but in reality they are all capable of destroying universes. My personal opinion on the matter is that this is unreasonable to the point of absurdity.
I'm a huge huge fan of these characters and I consider Superman my favorite character of all time, this isn't born of any spite against him or the verse, I just think it really cheapens these storylines to characterize Supes this way and it makes me feel bummed, but in battleboarding as a whole the culture trends towards exaggeration so many of our profiles are just wacky caricatures of the storylines, as if the source material is more about performing a thought experiment of what the highest possible interpretation of the info is, rather than a faithful representation. Most of our profiles are exaggerated, but standing in between me and any downgrade is a horde of fans of feel very very strongly about keeping the tier high (a good example of this was Armor's entirely reasonable downgrade of Mario, which was met with vicious protest just because they didn't want the character being downgraded, no matter how reasonable).
This is an issue somewhat unique to VSBW which revolves around indexing, the battles themselves are secondary (because the battles must adhere to the profiles). In other communities the battles are the primary focus and there is no official indexing. Under this format, any of the more unreasonable notions about a character are immediately met with resistance by the opposing side. In our community many CRTs are only participated in by the fans themselves, and its hard to have a voice as an "opposer" unless there is large opposition to a verse who cares enough to keep their profiles from being unreasonably high. So individual fandoms often act with relative isolation and independence, and these fandoms are almost by definition always motivated to pursue more and more upgrades.
This has upsides and downsides. It's better that issues are able to be decided in isolation, without the same points of contention playing out in every match up thread between different fandoms, but it has its drawbacks as I mentioned above.
Almost all of the verses I am thought of as downplaying are verses I am actually really big fans of. It's because I am a fan that the exaggeration bothers me, because I've read or watched the stories and know that, for instance, anyone in Avatar being capable of destroying the Moon is just ridiculous.
