After all, in the Trek universe, money is a thing of the past and living in a futuristic society they could just easily rebuild most of the destruction.
Well, the TV shows have the pseudo-communistic economy thing going on. Michael Wong of stardestroyer.net has a very long essay detailing the politics and economic situation of the Federation, and it doesn't paint a very pretty picture. The reboot films don't seem to delve very much into the economic or political situation beyond what's immediately necessary. Which is probably a good thing.
Even then, "money is a thing of the past" simply cannot happen without a reversion to prehistoric tribal populations. Capitalists will always be around, and any society that tries to simply provide its citizens with their needs as is appropriate will have a massive black/gray market. The Federation definitely isn't a utopia that allows for unlimited production of anything, and even a small lack of goods will result in illegal methods to acquire them. Rebuilding will still cost resources, replicators or not. Said resources need to come from somewhere, workers still need to be paid for the cleanup, etc.
Metropolis... I had to say I felt more nauseous seeing most of it get destroyed. I actually though "What about the cost of numerous property damages?" and "Holy shit, that's one nasty body count from the destruction."
I've posited that everything outside of the camera view in the finale shots is actually just a smoking wasteland, and they're being careful not to let us know that they've only managed to rebuild about one city block.
The violence in Man of Steel was gratuitous. Not over the top (it was certainly realistic in terms of the damage superhuman combat would cause), but it felt like they really, REALLY wanted to hammer us over the head with the grimdarkness of the new Superman.
It all felt way, way too serious to be a Superman film. This was like a PG-13 Punisher film. And they don't seem to get why the Marvel Cinematic Universe works as well as it does: they have good actors who actually match the comic characters closely in appearance and demeanor, they make things colorful and pretty instead of desaturating everything so it looks like the entire world is a Canadian fishing village on a stormy day, and they manage to make things more serious and realistic (such as Captain America shooting people in the face) without losing the feeling of the comics.
Superman probably would have been much, much better if it was made by the same guys as Iron Man.