What are some especially creative uses of 'minor' powers in cape comics and fiction that you've seen, especially the ones where it's not just the writer putting a thumb on the scale to advance/stall the plot?
My personal favorite remains Martha Sullivan from Astro City, a telekinetic who opted out of the cops and robbers game as a teenager upon realizing she had no stomach for violence and instead went into filmmaking, using her telekinesis to do the highest-fidelity-possible version of Harryhausen-style puppetery, classic-lucasfilm model spaceships and wireless wirework.
Despite his being embedded in a fundamentally hamfisted, mid-at-most-charitable comic, I've always been fond of the concept underlying Mr. Brownstone, a two-shot Spider-Man villain whose power is the ability to teleport small amounts of liquid; he uses this almost exclusively to teleport heroin into people's bloodstreams, either as a delivery method for wealthy clients who want to avoid needle marks or as an assassination technique.
Speaking of Spider-Man, and as a big fan of slapstick comedy, I'm fond of when the writers periodically remember that there's no rule that he can't use the super-adhesion power he uses to stick to walls to form a basically unbreakable grip on things other than walls, such as people's faces
The legion of superheroes has periodically been used for this, being in possession of a swarm of designated gag characters in the form of the Legion of Substitute Heroes, all of whom were introduced with powers framed as comically useless or shitty, which later writers would then retool as incredibly potent abilities when applied correctly. The LSH highlights a big recurring difficulty that I had trying to recall good examples of this, though, which is that a lot of powers that are introduced as "minor" (eat literally anything, change the color of any object in your line of sight) are in fact super useful from the word go if you aren't writing like a fucking moron; moreover, once you textually acknowledge the ways in which these would be useful, it overshadows, in the popular understanding of the character, the idea that the power was ever supposed to be minor or bad. Cypher from the X-Men was an infamous recipient of this when it was decided that "understanding all languages" included programming languages and at least a couple magic systems. He’s running a cult now. Good for him.
Ultimately that last bit of your question in particular does a lot of heavy lifting in how I assess this kind of thing; there are a lot more examples of the kind of thing you’re describing, but there aren’t many more that I actually like. Many attempts to do this kind of thing at the big two often parse as pedantic, unearned word-games, or playground-one-upmanship-style ass pulls, rather than a fair-play extrapolation from how a characters existing powers were previously shown to work; in single author works it can often feel like the author is patting themselves on the back and acting like they did something clever when what they actually did was win at shadowboxing against a power system that they set the terms of in the first place. One way in which Worm has remained in my good graces (you knew we were getting to this eventually) is that it doesn’t usually spend as much time pretending that obviously-useful powers aren’t potent on the face of it, before proceeding to come up with more niche, character-driven applications for those powers.
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