Whoever thinks Black Widow is weak or got "depowered" hasn't seen the same movie I saw.
Previously I just thought of her as some kind of vague super spy. Kind of boring really. Now that I see she was trained to be a barren (my kinda gal
) heartless killing machine (so fn sexy) I actually like her more than ever! None of that Kill Bill **** with her!
I think it's a bit of a shame that we've had to wait for the 11th Marvel movie to get any kind of backstory on Widow (and the backstory that is there is really vague). I kind of wish they had gone more with her comics backstory, what with her being a former KGB agent originally assigned to assassinate Tony Stark, but that would have caused a host of timeline issues, so not taking that route makes sense.
I am still curious as to why they decided to ditch the romance between her and Hawkeye and have her go for Bruce instead. Bruce still has Betty Ross (even though Marvel Studios can't actually make any more standalone Hulk movies without Universal's permission), and Hawkeye was Widow's first on-panel romance with any of the other Avengers. They teased it in the first Avengers, but they dropped it entirely when they decided to give Hawkeye a family.