well let's see:
A. you're pressing more buttons for better execution of your character; that puts more interaction between your fingers and your character, characters with good tech skill are generally satisfying to play; and as quoted by dr. peepee, "I like falco because I get to press a lot of buttons with him" and it feels satisfying to know that even with characters without any tech like mario or kirby can at least be somewhat technical with L-cancelling.
B. Part of why tr4sh sucks is because there is a lack of tech, and while just putting in L-cancelling wouldn't make the game that much better, it would at least feel rewarding to master that timing.
C. you can capitalize off of someone's missed L-cancelling, which adds a layer of depth to the punish game, and although L cancelling is fake difficulty, it is pretty essential for a game often called Project MELEE!
A) Subjective. There are more inputs to tech skill than just your shoulder trigger buttons, friend.
B) Subjective. Also, there's an assumption L-cancelling would make the game more satisfying. No, it would still have shoddy movement and terrible ledge mechanics, and getting hits would still feel about just as bad. One button isn't going to change that for me unless that button also nuked their character every time I pressed it.
Y'know, like League of Legends champion ultimates.
C) The first half isn't necessarily false, but the implication made following it is a bit misunderstood. I can punish the whiffed aerial because I have good spacing and awareness, not because of what you're implying is a significant technical flub (the significant part still having yet to be proven).
41 characters * 5 aerials each = 205
10/205 = .049
Roughly 5% of the aerials have this benefit according to your numbers (also 10/500 is 2% which is literally double the 1% you claim it barely reaches). I'd be willing to wager that significantly more than 10 aerials in the game change the shape of your hurtbox as well.
There likely are, but this is the number given to us of aerials that
aren't affected by the use of L-cancelling, which was the argument you and several others have been trying to advocate as significant enough to make auto-L-cancelling in tournaments unviable.
...Except my followup question would be about the physical evidence you have that these sorts of intricacies in character design actually decided a set. Like, okay, cool, I'd love to see this tech implemented in a way that leads to your success in high-stakes situations. One rule, though:
If it's anecdotal in any way, trying to say it's not an outlier falls through rather hard.
Because I could sit here and say "Hey, yeah, I won a tournament because of Kirby dipping low during his landing lag. It was really significant in every game I played." And you'd have to believe me because of one gfycat you saw. But maybe it was actually because I outplayed everyone at the tournament legitimately.
But you'd never know, and you'd only have to go off what I told you. Do you see how asinine that sounds?
This is entirely subjective and I completely disagree with you. The reward isn't for JUST shielding. It is for shielding and intelligently placing it to screw with your opponent, that is depth by definition and in my opinion that does sound like fun.
Baiting is a mental decision that involves the control of space. Mind you, if you're accounting for your landing lag as a means this, you're doing something needlessly over-complex, but more power to you, I guess?
That aside, I believe L-cancelling affects the skill ceiling similarly to every other tech. Being able to L-cancel consistently during high speed, input heavy, and stressful situations along with executing every other small but important part of technical skill is what makes Project M and Melee the pieces of competitive art that they are.
That's why I don't want to see "Auto L-cancelling Tournaments" become a common occurrence. I see no reason to change the way things are. It would also be another situation that splits the community, which is something we definitely don't need. I appreciate auto L-cancelling for what it is. It can be used to ease new players into the competitive community and maybe even in the future, help aging players play the game at the speed they used to.
It's definitely not the awareness of the players factored into their decision-making at top speed, in addition to high-velocity movement and depth due to the nature of being its own thing: a platform fighter.
No, that'd be silly. It's clearly all L-cancelling. And clearly, L-cancelling represents the same magnitude of competitive quality of these things, if not moreso.
Please.
If the community wants to split over being unwilling to change, they can be my guest. It's not like the Smash community hasn't done the same sort of thing fifty thousand times in the 16 years it's existed as a whole.