Your basis of the CO scene interestingly contrasts not only with my experience, but the experience of pretty much EVERYBODY else I know that's been there.
A few years ago I posted in their thread saying I'm visiting Denver for a week or so, would anybody be willing to house me for a few days.
People told me that the players there (Interim of Zeal in particular) used to be nice, but became "jaded with time." It's good to know now that it was actually true ... Nowadays, IoZ is a total ****head. He treats everybody like scum, especially those new to the scene--like I said, he called me "free money" despite knowing nothing about me other than that my permanent address is in CO, and he also mistreats an extremely hard-working and devoted newbie named Ethan. IoZ refuses to attend events (unless he can force Ethan to pay for him), and instead prefers to proclaim his
righteousness superiority to every CO player in existence ever from the comfort of his own home (I challenged him to a $5 MM, and not only did he mysteriously fail to show up, he actually accused ME of backing out for some bull**** reason [I think his excuse was that I didn't put more money down so it was a waste of his time to go]). He claims to be top 32 in the world, which is definitely not true and probably never was true.
Literally every single interaction I have had with this guy has been him jerking off to himself. Recently, I was trying to have a Facebook conversation with Steam (a Brawl player) who was considering picking up Melee Yoshi. I was excitedly informing him of the two great Yoshi players in this state when IoZ decided to butt in for no reason to proclaim
his righteousness that he knows everything about the Yoshi MU from "playing Bloshi [an apparently ****ty Yoshi] for YEARS" (emphasis in original text). He told Steam not to pick up Yoshi for reasons like, "dj-canceling with Yoshi gives Peach a free usmash," "Yoshi never wins CC wars against anybody," and "Sheik doesn't have to space or shield pressure Yoshi because the MU is an auto-win," which are clearly all unique to Bloshi's playstyle, because from the way IoZ described him, it seemed like dj-canceling was the most advanced technique he was able to perform and he had never heard of Yoshi's dtilt.
In this same conversation, he also brought up his "vast knowledge" of the Link metagame (for no apparent reason because he has explicitly told me that he knows for a fact that I do not play Link and only play Falcon) and then started bragging about how he got second in some NM tournament with Young Link (also for no apparent reason). All when I was trying to have a conversation with somebody else about something completely unrelated to any of this crap. Just to satisfy his own ego.
There was also this fellow named Mikezor. When I did what no other Denver player was willing to put in the effort to do and started a Denver-based Melee group, this guy showed up to the first meeting, which was actually pretty cool because we had like 6 people on just the first day and everyone had tons of fun. The next day he posted[COLLAPSE="Hidden"]
hey guys, i have an announcement
fish is an unsociable a$$hole
fish had the audacity to blame me for forgetting his wiimote at his own meet up
fish calls me out on smashboards when i really had no problem with the venue
fish thinks hes good at melee
fish is bad at melee
fish is an unsociable a$$hole
fish has a cool brother and a cool friend steph
fish is an unsociable a$$hole
fish is terrible at melee
[/COLLAPSE]which was quite false, since I never blamed him for forgetting the wiimote (no clue where he got that idea, we just asked him if he had brought one and if he was willing to drive to his house 5min away to pick one up), he quadruple-posted just to ***** about the venue being a Qdoba (again, no clue why that would be such a turnoff) and he only thought I sucked because I went easy on him--he was so bad that my kid brother 3-stocked him by spamming Dorf's jab and ftilt. Later on he also claimed (ok, just
strongly implied) that I abuse my girlfriend. After that, nobody wanted to come. One guy (screen name Moblin) took pity and showed up a few times, but even he stopped coming after one or two meetings.
There is also Roman. After I drove for like 2 hours round trip just to play with him back when I was a total noob and we had several close Falcon dittos in which he came out on top, but not like two-stocking me or anything. Then when I go back to CO for winter break and challenge people to MMs (this was the same time I challenged IoZ), he doesn't show up and instead waits until my announced period of availability expires, then suddenly starts trash-talking me and "calling me out" to "put me in my place" since he "***** me in Falcon dittos" (I kid you not) "homeboy! HOMEBOY!" back before I learned how to wavedash
Finally, there is Irvin, who isn't as big of a **** as these other fellows, but pulled a milder version of what Roman did. On one of the days I told people I would be available to play Smash but that they had to come to my house because my car was broken, he started trash-talking me and claimed that I was lying about my car being broken because I was just "too scared" to drive to his place to play him.
Maybe most of the players in CO are actually cool and I've just been extremely unlucky twice, but my experience is not something I have made up just for the sake of dissing the CO scene (as if I would want to in the first place if all the players were really cool). Actually, it's probably accurate to say that there are the same number or possibly more nice players than **** players in CO, but unfortunately the **** players dominate the scene so much that it hardly matters.
tl;dr It's true: right now, maybe not in the past, but right now the CO scene is a cough-medicine-and-used-diaper puree. With a pound of extra salt.