We can talk about what peter should be, but it has far more to do with just plain good and not-so-good writing.
I don't like boxing anything into a single concept. Peter doesn't always have to be a down-on-his-luck character. But if you're going to go for something else, you have to make the movie about that concept, not just rely on the old tropes of Spider-Man without putting in the work to get a new story out of him. The movies don't always have to be about the same thing, but they need to be about something.
Peter's backstory only works if he genuinely feels responsibility for the death of his uncle. If you're going to keep that plot point in, it always has to be the driving point for Peter's motivations. And once you do that, you're locked into "with great power comes great responsibility", which is always going to be a very self-sacrificial setup. If you go that route, you have to show how hard it is to do the right thing - something Raimi's films did very well. It's not wish fulfillment. Everything since Raimi has wanted to do Spider-Man's backstory while also trying to make him less of a sap. But that's the thing, you can't have one without the other if you go that route.
The problem is that people are getting real tired of the same story, but we're in endless reboots of Spider-Man. There's tons of stories about Spider-Man that don't revolve around him being luckless. But we're tied to his origins in these films. So what we're getting is just the same story written again and again with less emphasis on the "depressing" parts.
I don't want to heap too much praise on Raimi because his films have real problems (look to 3 to see them all surface and explode!) but he the greatest thing he did was make a movie about Power and Responsibility first and a Spider-Man movie second. The distinction is important.
