Far be it from me to ruin your bedroom interplay, but have you considered asking Nina about the origin of her sandwich socks? I smell a special retcon-tastic column coming up: "Sandwich Socks: Secret Origin"!
I guess I don't see what makes this stuff fan fiction but not every other superhero comic. "Writer I like takes character I like and tells a story about how he came to be" seems like a pretty valid approach to creating a story--it worked for Miller & Mazzucchelli, and in a way for Bendis & Bagley. Your mileage may vary regarding Johns & Frank, but then that's what the issue is, not that what he's doing is intrinsically uninteresting.
Batman Year One would've existed with or without Frank Miller--it was an editorial decision that he volunteered to handle. Superman: Secret Origin wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Geoff Johns.
In both cases a writer wanted to tell the story, though, right? Unless you really are blaming DC as an entity for approving the idea in Johns's case as being somehow worse than coming up with it themselves in Year One's case...
Sean, what I think he means is that a company saying "we need to rejigger this" is different than an individual dude being all like "Superman's origin has problems, I'm going to write a better origin for him and get DC to pay me for it."
It's not just the pointlessness-there's a certain hubris that goes along with it, too.
I was led to believe that the Clone Saga miniseries was not, in fact, continuity. As I recall this has been dubbed a sort of "writer's cut" to allow the original creators to get their original vision out as they intended before editorial's meddling. Sort of like Chris Claremont's X-Men Forever is the story he would have told had Jim Lee and Marvel not pissed him off enough to leave the series.
In other words, not something to huff and puff about and waste an afternoon writing one of the most bizarre columns I've read yet on Comixology..
