This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. Ridley is strong, powerful, vicious, destructive, fast, agile, smart and yes, big. Not all of these assets can be reasonably translated into a balanced Smash character. His size is the one thing that would definitely need to be compromised, which is why most people tend to fixate on it. As for the other character elements, we're essentially looking at a small, fast but weak Ridley or a small, powerful but slow Ridley. This is a point Sakurai made in his interview with Nintendo Power. In my eyes, neither of these options is worth making Ridley a playable character over a boss or a stage hazard, where he can be as big and threatening as the developers care to make him. The difference between Ridley supporters and skeptics is that supporters would be ok with these changes and skeptics would not.
Do we really need to go over this again? We already know nobody is changing their mind. You will never have a Smash Bros character where the transition will be seamless, every character have some new tricks or have been taken some liberties with. Samus is slow and floaty compared to her fast and agile Metroid counterpart, Zero Suit Samus has jet boots and fights unlike in Zero Mission, Ike is slow and is a heavy-hitter in comparison to his fast and agile PoR counterpart, Luigi is soaping around and firing himself off as a missile, Bowser is a wrestler, Diddy Kong stretches himself, Sonic doesn't boost around or move at the "speed of sound", Pac-Man's enemies are helping him in battle, I still don't understand why Ridley is the exception. Even then no matter what role you put him in he can't be a 100% faithful recreation, it's striving for the impossible.
There are two options for Ridley, and let's use the characteristics you mentioned:
As a character he can be strong, powerful, vicious, destructive, fast (in the air), agile and smart (determined by the player or the CPU).
As a stage boss he can be destructive and big.
Pick one.
Stage bosses are buff pinatas for the players to feed off of, so he can't be too strong, he needs to be predictable, and he has to move slowly for the players to attack and dodge him, in that role Ridley would never be able to shine because it's not about him as a character, he's only there solely for players to take advantage of, nothing more. As a playable character Ridley can have every one of those characteristics you mentioned with the exception of the size, and if you think none of those other characteristics are worth it if he can't have his size with him that's fair enough, but stop pretending that a stage boss Ridley wouldn't make any compromises, you can't get a perfect representation of him in this game, Smash is simply so different from every other Nintendo franchise that
nothing will have a 100% faithful recreation in the game, you'll have to make compromises and change characters accordingly no matter what, at least unless they're incredibly simple like the Yellow Devil. I don't care if you don't want Ridley as a playable character, everyone has their opinions, but you're gonna end up dissapointed with him in this game no matter what if you strive for this kind of perfection.
