No, that's what I meant.

It treats him like that, too. In the early MCU movies, Iron Man 2, Thor 1 & Captain America 1, there was a card at the end that said "{Title character} will return in 'The Avengers'". For this one, it said "Thanos will return in (sequel)"

Since they made a thing about him having his chest-doohickey put back in, maybe there can be a thing where the more advanced functions have limits, so he can go around doing the regular stuff. The problem with Iron Man is that instead of "super knight in shining armor", they went with "lateral-thinking tech genius futurist," which got some good character play, but means he has to keep improving in order to live up to the image of a tech genius. Also, sells more action figures. Although, you could keep doing that with slightly different armor. I think it would still be realistic and play to his inventor status to have the improvements be minor stuff that don't really alter his combat capabilities all that much, but which he gets excited about, maybe even to the eye-rolling of his friends. If you think about it, cars haven't changed much in their essential functions and performance over the last fifty years. It's still a four-wheeled thing that does roughly the same speed, has the same passenger capacity, and is operated in the same manner. If you learned to drive in the 1940s, you can operate a car that hits the market today. But there are all sorts of little things that have been added that might not change whether or not you can make a certain trip in a certain amount of time, but do greatly enhance the experience for the owner/operator/passengers, like wi-fi, DVD players, Bluetooth phone hookup, GPS, anti-lock breaks, airbags, etc. That might be a more realistic way of upgrading the Iron Man suits, and showing that Tony's still thinking and coming up with brilliant stuff, without breaking the limits in every movie.

They could also try to hit those character notes with Peter as his surrogate son. The way things have been going, he might make a good choice to take over as Iron Man. Like in the last Zorro movies, where Anthony Hopkins played the original Zorro, Diego de la Vega, and the main character, played by Antonio Banderas, was the new Zorro & his protegee. IIRC, there was a Batman cartoon years ago where a kid took over as Batman in the future, where Bruce Wayne was too old to do it, but served as a mentor. You could have something like that, where Tony CAN'T do the Iron Man stuff without his chest-thing flashing red, so he has to stay in a lab and send Peter out, and this is also presented as positive, because he has superpowers that let him survive suit accidents and malfunctions that would turn an ordinary person into a meatsack of bone jelly. Except, of course, they've already had Tony walk away from tons of stuff like that over the course of seven movies in which he was a major character, so introducing some realism into the canon at this point might be too little too late. And also, you can sell more tickets if Iron Man & Spider-Man are two different movie franchises.