Well, to begin with, those stats are bogus right from the start, in that it’s absurd to try to define most of these characteristics in only seven categories. It makes each individual category too large to be meaningful–there’s a huge difference between, for example, lifting 25 tons and lifting 50 tons, but the power rating number for each would be the same. In terms of the actual ratings, I assigned a whole lot of them over the years, working initially from the stats generated back in the OHOTMUME days and compressing them down into the seven necessary categories. Since then, I’ve typically been consulted at the very least. And in most cases, what you tried to get across was a “typical” power rating, rather than an “upper-extreme” one. One of the things that happened in the very early Handbook days was that, for example, Spider-Man’s strength rating was based on that famous moment where he lifted the big machine off his back in the Ditko days. So he could lift 30 tons. But phrased that way, new stories started to crop up in which he listed similar weights as a matter of course–that something he’d done once in a single moment of pushing himself to his ultimate limit had become redefined as his “new normal.” That’s what we think of as “power drift”, where the stats on some of these characters just naturally grow over time. Since then, we’ve tried to skew more towards the typical rating–but even there, there may be hold-overs from previous ratings still in the system. Once those ratings are set, too, they’re rarely revised when a character goes through some dramatic change that might alter the numbers. So it’s a very imperfect system overall–but fans like power ratings, so here we are.