For example, at Roy's release, DThrow to UpB was seen as his standard bread-and-butter damage dealing method. A lot of development in the advantage state meta focused on simple bread-and-butter combos, and these combos would lead to 20, maybe 30% damage, each. With less damage done per round in advantage state, that necessitated more rounds in advantage state to take a stock, which meant more won neutral encounters were required and that more time spent in the neutral game as a result. Thus, neutral game was more important than advantage.
On the subject of Roy and advantage, that's actually one of his bigger flaws that I never see brought up. His advantage state is not good. It's not bad in a vacuum, but it's one of his weaker points and is pretty weak relative to the rest of the cast, especially compared to Marth.
There are 3 main forms of advantage state, juggling, edgeguarding, and ledgetrapping, and Roy is bad at 2 of them.
Marth is very good at juggling. He can use his stupid walk speed and utilt to completely cover his opponent's landing options. Additionally, his Uair does quite a bit of damage, has lowish landing lag, autocancels in a short hop, and can kill. Roy has absolutely none of these things. His utilt is slower and has much less range; his walk speed, while good, isn't even close to Marth's, and while his uair has the same landing lag as Marth's, it doesn't autocancel in a short hop, does much less damage, and its sourspot hit is one of Roy's weakest sourspots, doing all of 6% and being minus on hit at low percents (That's when landed with, by the way. In the air, the sourspot's minus on hit until past 150%). That's not to say Roy can't juggle at all, far from it. His Usmash is fairly fast, extremely disjointed due to having arm invuln, and stays out for quite a while. Roy can juggle, but all of his good options for juggling are so committal that a bad read will result in your opponent getting to reset neutral for free, or even punish you for it, a risk Marth doesn't have.
For edgeguarding, Roy's physics work against him in a way Marth's just don't. Roy can edgeguard, but he has to be extremely careful he doesn't SD, and even then, Marth just has better tools for it, what with his fair covering more space below and in front of him, his bair's sweetspot being further away from his body, and his dair coming out faster with a sweetspot further from him.
Ledgetrapping is the type of advantage Roy is good at. He can cover options incredibly effectively with Nair, dtilt, jab, pivot grab, and Side-B, and he's good at threatening ledgetrumps as well, while still being able to punish if your opponent buffers an option. The problem is that this really isn't unique to him. Marth has good ledgetrapping as well, though I'd argue his is a bit worse, as do a **** ton of other characters. Being good at ledgetrapping just isn't enough to make up for his lackluster juggling and edgeguarding.
Roy's also good at techchasing, which is his best way to get kills, but techchasing is pretty weak in general in this game compared to other types of advantage.
Ehhhhhhhhhh, even though there are fewer rounds of advantage state needed to take a stock, these rounds of advantage are longer simply due to the advantage state optimizations. So, the few neutral wins needed are more spread apart in the game's time frame. Basically, just because advantage state has been optimized, doesn't necessarily mean that games go by more quickly.
Of course, this is speculation on my part. One could rigorously quantify if and/or how these advantage state optimizations have significantly affected game lengths simply by doing an analysis on how long modern games last on average compared to games from the past.
Yeah, unlike in Melee, where edgeguarding is the main form of advantage and generally lasts like 2 seconds, in this game, it's more about juggling and ledgetrapping, which take much longer.
