The vulture needn't be that bad. But the rest sounds awful, I hope to Cthulu that it's a wind up. It would also seem very odd for the executives to get meddling now after three runaway successes in Spidey 1,2 and 3.
I can't see execs nixing the Black Cat, purely based on that even the dumbest executive would notice that hot woman+skin tight black leather jumpsuit=teenage boys queud up down the street for cinema tickets. I think the Lizard shouldn't be in 4, he's big enough to have his own movie, 3 really suffered from having too many bad guys (seriously, Venom is the MINOR bad guy, what the fuck?!) when 1 and 2 had one that worked really well.