Don't know if this will mean anything to anyone's argument, but Lois was always considered a central character to the show, not just by her name being first in the title, but by the show's original working title of Lois Lane's Daily Planet. I read the original title in an article in the April 96 issue of SPX.

Here it's talking about Deborah Joy Levine:
Quote
"With her treatment, it was goodbye to the early working title ("Lois Lane's Daily Planet"), and in with a set-up that was part newsroom drama, part romantic comedy, and part science fiction adventure. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all was how rarely Superman appeared - as the title suggested, this was, at heart, the story of two people, Lois Lane and Clark Kent. Superheroics came lower down the agenda."
I mentioned something earlier in this thread asking if fics that stray away from canon shouldn't be labeled as elseworlds or alt-universes since the events in these fics never actually happened to the Lois and Clark of LNC:TNAOS (e.g. marrying Lana before meeting Lois.) If the fics are labelled as such, then probably most anything could be done with the characters.