I have never seen Lois and Clark! I should. My Lois and Clark are based on no particular version, just the Lois and Clark I knew about from the air, before I'd ever read a comic books, mixed in with bits and pieces from all sort of other versions. (That tends to be the fanfic I like best for them, too - not a particular canon, just Superman canon.)

And a big part of that ur-story for me is that Lois is near the top of the very short list of baseline humans in the DCU who can go toe to toe with the top rank of metahumans, and win. And she does it without a billion-dollar corporation, or fancy weapons and technology, or vaguely-racist secret martial arts training - just with the power of Lois Lane, Girl Reporter. Because she's just that good. And good reporters are RL superheroes already.

And I think that's one of the reasons Clark is so drawn to her - both that she is just plain great, but also that she, along with Bruce, is one of the few people he knows could and would stop him, if he ever needed to be stopped - and who he trusts to know if he ever does.

And there is not nearly enough out there that just focuses on Lois being able to take on everyone else, if she's motivated enough, and the "Lois finds out about Clark" story is a classic, and it occurred to me I've read a lot of things where Lois could have figured it out but didn't try as hard as she could, out of respect for him, so I wondered what would happen if she was doing it because he wanted her to.

And then the first few thousands words of that one came spilling out! And then I got to the part where I needed all the Lois competence porn and realized I didn't even know enough about how her powers would actually work to fake it well, and stalled. :/