Honestly I would have thought Kyle ion was a more fair matchup or max faraday as ion displayed te ability to be in numerous places at once...
Joker I felt is above everyone else on this list.
__________________ Quotes from Hia8:
"I claimed that the science is sometimes faulty."
"You don't understand. This is fiction. That means none of this stuff really happened."
"There is no writer to purposely ignore a character's natural ability just because it suits the story."
"in some cases because the writer knows that Character A will dominate Character B easily and refuses to allow this to happen for the sake of the story."
That's my thought too. Max's personal insecurities aside (not that Joker's a model of mental consistency), I don't think he ever wielded the full power of the Creation Wheel. I might be wrong, because I never read his original "God" arc. But in later incarnations, he held only a fraction of its power...still enough to be a high level reality warper, but not the end-all.
^ During the original arc, Max did hold the full power of God, thanks to the Creation Equation. However, he didn't do a whole lot on the high-end... Not as much as EJ, at least. And like you said, he was pretty emo/mentally unstable at times--that held him back quite a bit, me thinks.
Anywho, EJ may have done more on panel, but I'm not really sure how he's beating a kid who, for all intents and purposes, held the literal power of God..? But yeah, feat-for-feat, EJ wins.