Pastaboy = the Jesus of this thread. Seriously. He speaks the truth.
Only cause he fits your biases.
Oh, and please, I thought it was obvious, my likes/dislikes have nothing to do with how I view match-ups. With the exception of Marth, all of my favorite characters suck in Brawl. I love Pokémon (at least I used to back in the day) and I've actually recently picked him up as my secondary. However, let's not lie to ourselves here. He sucks Pokéballs. For the Pokémon match-ups I also had to consider the effect of stamina on how long that monster will go before he has to give his opponent a free smash switch out.
He has issues, but learn timing. Part of being good with a character is learning to minimize their weaknesses.
Switch while your opponent is recovering, problem solved, no free smash.
Us Zelda/Sheik users figured that trick out a long time ago.
As for Yoshi. He's not that great from what I've seen. Yup, those are the key words there, I know. Ottawa isn't exactly big on Smash; our Smash community is relatively tiny and so perhaps we live a very sheltered life as far as Smash match-ups and the like go. Nobody I've met has ever thought that Yoshi was equal to Metaknight, despite knowing about (or perhaps just hearing about) chain throws and such. Oh, and I'll continue to make jabs at Yoshi because it seems to rile up the Yoshi mains.
Then your community is very sheltered indeed.
We had a Yoshi main and he floored everybody when he first came in. We called him The Yoshi Guy since he actually knew how to use him. Use him he did... until he found that he just couldn't get past the Marths, Metas, Snakes, etc. He uses Game and Watch now because Yoshi just didn't cut it. Do other Yoshi's cut it? Maybe. I just haven't really heard of any yet.
Marths I understand. MKs sort of. Snakes, no way. First time I picked up Yoshi (which was after I learned about his death grab) I 3-stocked a Snake of about even skill with me.
Every single stock ended because I got the death-grab.
The point is, this guy either didn't know how to use Yoshi properly, sucked with him, or simply quit before the discovery of these advanced tactics (which are a recent development).
Prior to the deathgrab, there's no way Yoshi could even go even with Snake, let alone have an advantage. The fact is that Yoshi recently had a tactical epiphany. He is NOTHING like he once was.
So overall, your friends do not trump hard data.
By the way, don't get me wrong, I really like how there's posters/players like Mmac who argue for the characters that have generally been looked down upon. Now how come I don't get any Lucas mains coming in here posting that he's underrated?
Look, the point isn't that Yoshi is underrated, the point is he's got the match-up.
Here, you're the one who's arguing against the common wisdom, saying that Yoshi vs. MK isn't even.
Why? Because you think he's a totally sucky character, and a sucky character can't be neutral with the best character of the game, right? Wrong, it's not too unusual for an overall poor or mediocre character to specifically counter enough attributes of a top tier character to make a neutral or advantagious match-up against the character. It's not about overall ability, if Yoshi sucks, so what? That doesn't change his MK match-up.
Really, you're like the person who comes in saying how underrated a character, except in this case it's you saying it's overrated. The problem is... no evidence.