Plot Vs. character driven stories

I keep getting into debates with this guy, which basically end up being about whats better: heavy plot, or heavy character development.

For example, he loves LOST but hates Heroes. The reason being that LOST is vary character driven, each episode focuses on one character at a time and tells a little more of their story before they went to the island. Heroes on the other hand throws a lot more action and story at you then character development. I'm basically the exact opposite, I've started to hate LOST because it never goes anywhere, but I love Heroes because it gives you a vary good story, at the sacrifice of focusing on the characters in depth.

If you ask me, a story doesn't need to go that in depth on a character for you to get a good enough feel for how this person feels. Actions speak louder then words. We don't need a character to have an inner monologue about how much he hates criminals to get that point across. If he flips out and beats the crap out of every criminal he sees we get the same message, and with a lot more entertainment. And in all honesty to continuously throw at us what this character's convictions are is kind of insulting as viewers, as if we couldn't figure this out on our own.

This is also a problem I have with a lot of classic literature I read. I can't truly get into a book if I think the story is boring. Fiction is all about conflict, it all boils down to a choice the main character has to make. When the choice is something I can really feel for, like "do I use this power for good or my own personal gain" I'll love it. However if the choice is little more then "Do I marry this one person who is of my social class, or this other person who is not" then I don't give a rat's ass about any of it.

This mainly accounts for why I love superheroes so much. Their actions actually count and have meaning. When Spider-man rejects the symbiont suit he rejects having much greater power in exchange for the clarity to use his limited power responsibly. When Hester decides to make her A look nice...well...some people are kinda shocked but its mostly just business as usual.

Now I'm not saying everything needs to be a fly by the seat of your pants thrill ride, heck even heavily character driven stories can be good. Take Crash for example, this is all about the human interactions between people, everyone in that movie was connected in some way and you really got a good feel for the characters in there. But they also let the actions of these people speak for themselves. The raciest cop puts his prejudice behind him when he really needs to. The other cop who wears the mask of Political correctness turns out to have problems of his own. These are all revealed more through what these characters do then what they say in conversation or through body language or anything else.

Maybe thats just me though, what do you think?