Should nair really be considered a bad neutral game move? Shallow nair approaches are obviously bad but why is it bad for example when used as zoning move without momentum towards them, or as pivot surprise weapon after a dash back?
Obviously if they position themselves very well you can get punished, but that can happen with basically anything if they get such a read. You just have to make sure that there is considerable risk for them in being right outside of the nair range, by having threat zones around your landing positions (that's why you don't use it as approaching tool, no threat zones in front of your landing position).
Please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this or if I'm missing an important fact.
About full jump against Ice Climbers, I would usually abstain from using it, but from my understanding, it is fairly good when you are already in a bad situation, because if you short hop then your landing timing is very predictable and something as simple as WD away-> WD in when you land ->d-smash or even grab will work out for the ICs a lot of the time.
The full jump won't magically make you return to a neutral position but the longer air time and more drift options will make it harder to cover your landing, while chasing you with an aerial will allow you to DI away and allow for a safe landing usually since ICs have horrible horizontal airbourne movement.
Can a shield stop nair be used as option select? The idea would be to intrude somewhat in your opponents zone and use it as soon as you expect a hit. If you shield their move the jump won't come out and you will do a shieldgrab, which isn't as bad here as the forward movement you did before messes up spacings and approaching shieldgrab is usually not what one expects. If your shield isn't hit you will do the nair which is a useful zoning move in the situation imo. The obvious problem could be if they hit you just after you release the shield or if they DD around it and manage to avoid the nair.
Another thing I want to mention is that I observe a lot of instances in Melee I would refer to as "quantized approach timings", where a player is able to put out an attack at a certain place at specific times, but has at least a hard time doing it inbetween those. The most common example would be someone dashing at you: They can do a direct attack, or build in some sort of delaying technique like a WD in place or a short dash back before continuing to dash at you. The point is, in this case the attack would happen already considerably later, and any option you choose with a short vulnerable window is relatively safe if this vulnerable window is placed right into the time window between direct and delayed approach.
Keep in mind there are a lot of theoretical options to attack at the inbetween timings, like dashing at a slower speed, making the dash flick as short as possible, or jumping and applying backwards momentum while airbourne. It therefore isn't completely safe by any means (especially as most options have two vulnerable windows, a startup and a cooldown), but it forces the opponent to choose out of a limited toolbox and therefore has its merit in my opinion.
Again PP makes it look easy. I think you really have to understand the nuances of specific stuff to pull this sort of play off. I mean he's doing it to GOOD players too. We've probably all felt moments of "wow I understand everything" when playing, but we're all humans so on any given day we can be feeling different things, thinking of different strategies or whatever, etc. I think once you accept that everyone has a different idea of what is "right" to them, and start respecting that, you start seeing things more clearly.(but depending on what kind of person you are that can either be really easy or super hard)
