More powerful, more invincible, than ever before

Reading DC’s The Batman Chronicles has become something of a revelation for me.
The series reprints Batman’s adventures, in order, starting from the first appearance. Volume 6, which I finished recently, isn’t one of the best but it does include the good crimebusting story Crime Takes a Holiday; The Joker Walks the Last Mile, which would end the Clown Prince of Crime’s penchant for murder until the early seventies (but makes up for it by the Joker’s absolutely hysterical turn as a supposedly law-abiding citizen); and the Penguin’s ingenious gambling scam in Four Birds of a Feather.
What leaps out at me reading these, though, is that the Batman comes off as well, human.
An amazing human, certainly: Brilliant detective, ace acrobat, a dynamo in hand to hand combat. But not that far beyond what a real human being could plausibly do. That’s a far cry from the past decade or so when it’s been a given that Batman is as far beyond a real human being, in his own way, as Superman is.
In these early stories, one guy can jump Batman from behind in the middle of a fight and take him out; two or three men going hand to hand can overwhelm him. Today you’d need a platoon of ninjas to do the same.
Even in the early seventies (I was reading a Christmas story from the era, Silent Night, Deadly Night recently) the Batman was still closer to his roots than his current fruits; a reluctant thief, a guy in good physical condition but no martial artist, is able to take Batman on for a couple of minutes.
Today it’s a given, almost a mundane fact, that nobody beats the Batman. Heck, in Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP plotline, it turns out he’s even implanted a split personality in his brain to take over if he’s ever mindhacked. As one critic observed, how do you beat someone who thinks of things like that?
Just as Superman’s powers have expanded from his early years (when he couldn’t fly and could be felled by electrical bursts), so have Batman’s. Probably for the same reason: As super-heroes become less amazing and more routine, an obvious solution is to make them more amazing—smarter, more powerful, more skilled, more superior to everyone else (The Superman Encyclopedia by Michael Fleisher has a detailed account of how his powers grew over the years). The same is true of power levels in general: To make a new villain impressive, you simply show him beating up someone who was formerly invincible. It’s why the Silver Surfer was top of the food chain in the Silver Age (Galactus excepted, of course) and now only middling in the ranks of cosmic characters.
I don’t know that one handling of Batman is inherently better than the other, but I must admit I prefer the old way, when it was okay to acknowledge he had limits; a 1980s conversation between Flash and Atom—both professional scientists—pointing out that while talented, Bats was strictly an amateur in the lab—would probably never fly today.
But while Superman’s powers have been drained or reduced a couple of times since the Silver Age, that’s a lot harder to do with Batman’s skills. So .. where does he go from here?