Right, there were so many more interesting places they could have taken it! Having Lana just change her mind about Lex in Hydro and ask Clark to take her back (when she already knew that she was pregnant), or wanting to leave Lex at the altar and run away with Clark, made her character look so fickle and there was just no need for it. There were so many more interesting conflicts they could have gone with instead, like Lana drawing away from Lex's darkness after seeing how far he was taking his experimentation. They did hit on that a little bit in the episode Freak when Lana looks wary during her final hug with Lex, but they had to keep going back to it really being about how much more she loved Clark, which just really cheapened the whole thing. Promise was impressive in how terrible it managed to make all three characters look though, which was presumedly not what they were going for!

And Lois wasn't as bad when she was working alongside Clark at the DP, I thought that they had a pretty fun dynamic in early season 8 especially, but her character was so all over the place before then that it was really hard for me to adjust to the show suddenly treating her as a serious reporter now, so I wish that they had skipped most of the episodes between Devoted and Plastique that her character appeared in quite honestly