WisCon Panel Report: Strong or Stroppy

So, in starting to write up my panel notes from WisCon, I've realized that I'm not that great a panel note-taker. Or rather, while I'm good at writing down what's of interest to me (the title of a book I want to read, a thought spurred by the panel that I want to follow up on later, a particularly clever insight offered by one of the panelists), I'm not all that great at capturing the overall flow of the panel for someone who wasn't there. I'm going to try to do my best to construct panel reports that are informative and don't grossly misrepresent what was going on, but be aware that these are sort of impressionistic.

Okay, disclaimer over. The first panel I attended was:
Strong or Stroppy? Annoyingly Feisty Female Protagonists

In SF/F-particularly, it seem lately in paranormal romance-the protagonist/narrator is meant to be a 'feisty' woman, but comes across instead as irritatingly stroppy in attitude, and rather less tough in action and practice than she sounds. Has this become a rather tedious cliche, and what might other, different, models of effective strong woman characters look and sound like?

Panelists: Vito Excalibur (M), Lesley Hall, Alma Alexander, Paula Fleming, and Jennifer Stevenson.
( And this is what the panel said... )