Expanding on my earlier post:
Lets say you're knocked off the stage and are at the distance where you can quickattack forward -> downforward for a sweetspot. From this position you can recover in that way, or you can choose to keep falling until you're at the position where you can sweetspot with upforward->downforward, and also leave the option to upforward->forward and land on the stage. Or, you can keep falling even further until you can go upforward->forward and get the ledge (won't sweetspot, but still will grab the edge if it's open). Or you can keeeeeep falling until up->upforward will get you to the ledge or stage. If you still have your second jump, you can delay your recovery even further, or use it to get to locations you passed where there were different recovery options, or get to new locations with the slightly forward momentum. Etc.
Meanwhile, your opponent is trying to edgeguard you. The longer you wait to recover, the fewer options you leave yourself for recovery. But what you gain is potentially getting your opponent to try to edgeguard you prematurely. At which point you stall just slightly and recover to wherever's open while they're out of position.
So, lets say as you steadily fall towards the stage, you pass through points A, B, C, D, which correspond to the locations I mentioned earlier. Though point B may leave you the most options, if the opponent expects you to recover from there, then he can anticipate the timing and react accordingly. If you recover from point A, then he won't be ready yet. If you recover from point C, then he'll have done whatever he was going to do to edgeguard you when you were at point B, and now you may have a short window where you can get around him. This doesn't mean point A or point C are better than point B, it just means that occasionally using less 'safe' options is useful because it's less expected. On occasion, of course.
But also as Axe said, from that position it's the quickest way to get back, so if it looks like your opponent won't be able to get to the edge before you can recover that way anyways, might as well do it.
On the topic of Pika vs Samus:
It's a matchup you have to play a little differently than a lot of other matchups. The issue I have with it (and sometimes takes me a match to remember) is she can CC everything, and it usually looking to. This means you can't just do your shfflnair stuff all the time, and rising uair doesn't even work for a while. She can also punish you for being right above her, or trying anything on her shield. So it's this kinda weird dynamic of baiting her movements and hitting with odd aerials, or aerials at odd angles/positions, in order to rack up damage. You edgeguard her really well, and she dies early to usmash (if you can manage to land one), but the building up damage part without taking too much damage in the process is the hard part.
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= :ibwc: