I liked Batman in the LEGO movie a lot more than I liked the LEGO Batman movie. I also really liked Batman in the movie he shared with Superman. I liked Hawkeye a whole lot better than his & Batman's bastard child in "Arrow", because Hawkeye was a small part of three very good movies. Batman as a small part of a kid's cartoon, or as 1/3 of a movie generally sneered at by the movie and comic book snob communities, was similarly very enjoyable. I liked the Nolan trilogy, and felt it followed the exact opposite trajectory of the prior four movies. The TV show was stupid, but it seemed to know that and roll with it. I have not seen any of the cartoons because I just couldn't be bothered, as I am not that much of a Batman fan per se. I just watch all the movies with him in them, because they intersect with the kind of movies I like to see. I saw "Taken" and "John Wick" before it was cool, so I think you can understand why I would also go to see Batman despite not being the Batman equivalent of a Trekkie, and the apparent consensus among the Batfan community that about half of them suck (which is also my view of Star Trek movies, for whatever it's worth, and I can do the live-long-and-prosper salute). But even the good Batman movies, he spends a lot of time whining or at least grimly thinking about how tough this enemy is, and what the right thing to do about it might be. You know how much time Brian Mills or John Wick spend on those issues? Or John McClane? Or John Rambo? John Matrix? John Kimble? Jack Bauer? Yeah. See? Lego Batman and Batfleck had to share screen time with other characters, so they had much less time to whine about whether or not they should turn themselves in so the Joker wouldn't kill more politicians, or in physical therapy. I'm pretty sure NO ONE goes to a Batman movie to watch physical therapy or trying on leg braces. You can yammer about realism all you want, but realistically, he'd need a lot more than one knee brace or a hell-pit prison chiropractor.

I think that by sharing the screen, Batman is made to work a lot better. He was also the only character who made even a lick of sense in Suicide Squad, and in both of his movies Batfleck came across as the most competent person around. The necessary ineptitude to provide tension in a film was forgivable in Batman Begins, tolerable in his struggle against his greatest foe, and cleverly swapped out for physical encumbrances in the finale. In Suicide Squad, he served as the counterpoint to the - for lack of a better word - characters who were featured, by establishing limits to their superhuman abilities. In other words, they were not as good as Batman, in any sense of the term "good." In BvS, he was up against a god-like alien monster with no conscience or human empathy (or thought he was), so they didn't need to handicap him or have him failing a couple of times in the early stages of the film. In the LEGO movie, they were actually making fun of him, AND he was an example of the elite group that were insufficient to the challenge, making the everyman protagonist necessary. I think these sorts of roles better serve that image of him as this super-competent genius ninja expert-in-everything, that we are apparently supposed to have.

It's kind of like how in Wheel of Time, Lan and Moiraine could only star in a book together after they were well-established in the series, because only fans would want to read that. It also had to be about their younger and less-experienced selves, and I think Jordan was smart not to ever give a Lan PoV anywhere else. Lan is the closest thing WoT has to that hyper-capable fighter type like Batman.