I had a lot of fun with the Brawl- setups and the tournament as a whole, few pointers:
Meta Knight
I honestly believe MK didn't deserve so many nerfs after the last patch I played (probably a really old one, wouldn't be able to tell which one). His moveset now seems lacking in pretty much every way, a few non-participating Dutchies kept asking me if there was any difference between vBrawl MK and MKminus and I kept answering that there wasn't.
A lot of moves just didn't seem to have any special or new uses. I found myself mostly using nado to beat out broken hitboxes and following it up with the occasional juggle traps. Note the usage of the word 'trap' rather than 'combo', while I agreed with the weird uair I saw in earlier installments I simply didn't think the new one was actually more effective than the vBrawl one. The knockback is still too high at mid-high percentages to combo into a whole lot more than Shuttle Loop and that just doesn't quite cut it. When I see an opportunity to punish I'd pick almost any other move instead.
His assets in Minus are the same as in Vanilla only they are a lot weaker relatively since every other character has been so immensely buffed in more ways than just hitstun. Most characters now have tools to counter the moves that made MK overpowered, borderline broken in Vanilla and MK didn't really get more options to compensate that with. It's obviously not really a bad thing that he's more balanced in Minus than he is in Vanilla, but the relative nerf is a bit too much. His strengths are less powerful (characters having more ways to deal with his defensive game, nado and offstage game) and the cons he has in Vanilla (aerial mobility, difficulty with handling projectiles) are way more easily exploited.
Admittedly, some tools he had in vBrawl are still in the very same way applicable to Minus. My preference to use nado to counter some of the more annoying moves was the same manner of how I treat Nado in Vanilla. It's still a really powerful move, it's just no longer broken because it no longer covers all options.
Other tools, like ftilt, just lose all the shine they had in Vanilla. I saw no reason to ever use dtilt, it didn't seem to reliably link into grabs so that really just left me with ftilt or dash attack to follow it up with. Dash attack also seemed too slow to be a lot more reliable, and ftilt didn't really have interesting followups.
Ftilt and dtilt are way less interesting to use for spacing, most characters either have projectiles to deal with them or simply some ******** move with a lot of mobility, speed and range to beat it out. MK's walling is rather inefficient because he doesn't have the mobility to support it with. In Vanilla that wasn't as much of an issue and was more of a compensating con than what it is now: a severe handicap.
Transcendent priority isn't much of a help, especially against projectiles. In fact, it's probably worse than just having a lot of priority.
Conclusion: Not really able to conclude this, buff MK kkthnx
Stages
I'm not going to give a writeup on every individual stage, but I can give some food for thought on it. I honestly have the feeling that the stagelist is what would've been the recommended Vanilla stagelist if BPC was the omnipotent one of the international Smash community. I honestly do not mind his ideas about what the Vanilla stagelist should look like, but I don't feel it's wise to directly translate those ideas into Minus. Jungle Japes is an awful stage to include, projectiles are too strong in this game for such a stage to be allowed.
Projectiles are already stronger, both in terms of how powerful they are as in terms of shields being less effective to counter them with. I didn't play enough on Green Greens, but I imagine it would feature the same big flaw. Multiple stage bans do not solve the fact that counterpicking is too powerful with the variety of stages offered and I honestly think that removing these 'projectile CPs' would solve a lot. I didn't get the chance to really play anyone on 75m but I honestly didn't feel like sharking is all too easily countered in Minus...
Conclusion: Stages make counterpicking too powerful, the stagelist seems to be more of an 'ideal' vBrawl list rather than composed for Minus.
Heavy armor
No QQ about losing to Bowser, more of an insight into the design aspects of heavy armor.
Heavy armor is imo a very striking
anti-fun mechanic. I sincerely hope the design team of Minus made the game to mostly be fun and coincidentally competitive. Heavy armor is, in terms of competition, balanced to an acceptable degree and careful implementation allows it to not be overpowered. 10% perpetual heavy armor is different, however. I'm not entirely up to date on the contemporary damage values, but it should pretty much translate into setup or combo moves not working, projectiles losing their charm, balanced multihit moves serving no purpose and it requires certain moves to be sweetspotted in order to work out (say, Kirby bair).
This is usually no problem in Vanilla because the HA values are relatively low, temporary 3-4% HA that require you to disable your character (Wario Bike, Snake cypher) are usually implemented to make moves viable. 10% HA without a cost is weird and is really only fun for the Bowser player. It's the same reason mana burn mechanics are considered unwanted, not because of the competition but mostly because of the intense anti-fun it features. You disable part of your opponents moveset not by stunning them or rooting them, but simply because you destroy a core resource.
The 12% HA during hitstun isn't even that bad. In neutral situations it's not an issue and it'd be more of a way to prevent endless combos of happening. It's perhaps still a tad too much, I wouldn't mind seeing it at 10%. It's a temporary buff that would likely be welcomed to weaken Bowser's most obvious flaw, being super comboable.
Conclusion: HA is fine so long as it's triggered and temporary, the most glaring reason to not implement it on Bowser the way it is is because of the intense anti-fun.
That's all for now, perhaps more later when I think of something exciting.