Argh...can't...stay...away....
"The Road Taken" is not a L&C story. The Clark in the story was only somewhat like "our", your Lana had only a hint of the L&C Lana and Lois, your Lois was the most like our "Lois", but still wasn't our Lois.
I want to refute this, but first I want to go back to one of Sara's key points,
It’s the CHARACTERISTICS of said characters that make them solely L&C characters, rather than Superman movie characters or Smallville characters or what have you.
Even in LnC (this is me, not Sara btw)it's not _one_ thing that makes "our" Clark but a combination that varies and overlaps from person to person. Thus this "our" Clark is never objective, never one thing alone for everyone. It's always "somewhat" Clark, and in fact even in the series it's "somewhat" Clark as his character's consistency can be debated. The same can be said for "our" Lois and as for Lana-- I believe Terry warned his readers beforehand of that particular change. This is somewhat similar to MLT's strategy, (which is a good strategy for some protection from premise-related negative feedback, but as Terry's example suggests, not fail-safe).
But back to Framework--to make your argument without the qualifiers ("it's not Clark" as fact)-- even based on what Sara states-- you need to prove that we can agree 100% on what are the "characteristics" of Clark and the "characteristics" of Lois that we saw on the show. Then, based on that democratic metric we can judge what is an "objectively" good characterization.
But as I've said, these "characteristics" are themselves subject to interpretation from the moment they were shown to us. There is a way around this however, you can adhere strictly to what was overtly mentioned and requires no interpretation. I'm not sure anyone would actually want to do this though...you wouldn't be left with very much to work with.
alcyone (who is embarrassed for being unable to keep away, poor horsie...)
