Of course he can be more manly without the knee. He has the largest hammer* in the game.
I've been playing Dedede off and on since Brawl came out. Over the summer I started going back and forth between maining him and Metaknight. I didn't really dedicate myself to Dedede until around August when the MK ban issue started up. I always found Dedede more fun to play anyway, I only picked up Metaknight to handle Dedede's bad matchups. Recently though I've started playing Game & Watch and I really like him, so I may end up just using MK in dire situations (like against other MKs).
As for the infinite, I really don't care about whether it's banned or not. The best way to perform the infinite is to set the C-stick to grab (Bricksticking) which I don't do anyway. This results in me only ever Small Step chaingrabbing DK, but there's not much of a difference in the long run since almost nobody uses Mario, Luigi, Bowser, or Samus in tourney anyway. If they ban the infinite, these matchups will become favorable for those characters, but it still probably won't be enough to turn the match in their favor since they can just be chaingrabbed normally (except Luigi, which is very interesting indeed).
I also think that instead of banning infinites entirely that they could just change their parameters for them. The limit on the infinite grab does not need to go to 300% when bthrow kills below 250%. They could also put time constraints on it, like it must end after 30 seconds and can't be performed again for another 15 seconds, but that might just make things more confusing.
As for color...I just use the default lol. CO18 uses purple and Seibrik and Fogo both use pink and I don't wanna make it seem like I'm more of a fanboy of theirs than I actually am. None of the other alts are good either, so yeah.
And "You're too slow" is not effective, just annoying. Except against Inui. But otherwise it just sucks.
*The hammer is his *****.