Not to come across as "parents are fighting" (never would happen, fyi), but revisionism is a *****. It will always be a *****. This applies to both/any side or perspective. So I'm not saying "trust me blindly here" or whatever.
The goal post for banning MK in Brawl was STEEP, and I'd say inherently was made to never be achievable in the first place.
In countless community and backroom votes, the requirement stated by THE BIGGIES (MLG/The Midwest Cartel [even if this latter group were mostly pro-ban]) was 60 or 65%, in other words "hyper majorities".
I wouldn't want to guess, nor feel like scouring through the past to find the results, but I think almost every attempt ever had more than 50% of the vote being in favour of a ban, I think the best it ever mustered was between 55 and 59%.
By the time MK was "banned", as a decision made by a group of TOs known as the UBR, it was a unanimous decision - one person abstained. That West Coast TO ended up causing strife publicly afterwards.
How it fell apart incredibly quickly were two factors:
"Holy **** how could we ban the only character who actually has a neutral game vs Ice Climbers?" (as in, everyone's main would be near auto-lose or too risky a neutral, while MK at least had multiple jumps and down air to play anti-grab that most players could execute after 3-4 years of the game).
and
Alex Strife, Apex TO: "Japan won't come to American tournaments if MK is banned".
The mood changed rapidly.
ICs were becoming just as much of a problem for the game's health, and it just so happened the easiest player-based solution was also the biggest problem for the health of the game (but had produced a scene at that point of time who generally produced an 'immunity' to said plague). When talking about issues with stages, all the stages we lost due to MK being too dominant there, were also all the stages ICs essentially couldn't win on.
The multiple years of surgical rule changes and stuff backfired. Conservatism with stages won out forever as a result and we'll never see a perfectly fine stage that a character can shark on (when those potential sharkers mostly "sucked" prior to Bayo) ever coming back because of "trauma".
A fairly large amount of people who voted no to banning him were in a camp of "it's too late", "people have put too much time into him, it isn't fair" "I learned the MK match up and I like the challenge" (hint: this includes me).
Thus all the angst seen since then that oft is interpreted by people as "rushing". I am unbelievably afraid of a repeat of "it's too late" in any situation, thus my general stance of 'get rid of bayo' in S4 that people would remember me for.
I was mostly always on the fence for an MK ban, pretty sure I was "no" at the earliest stages, and I also empathised with the idea of "too late". I had a strong feeling that if S4's lifetime continued that by the time Bayo reached these "numbers" people were setting as goalposts we would've been hit with the "too late" once more. I would say I'm 99.9% confident on that, the human mass psyche aching in my bones.
In hindsight though, with those lovely 20/20 lenses, if we had banned MK shortly after genesis1, and then appropriately responded in a similar way to ICs once NAKAT figured out "mid range dash grab buffered back roll desync at low %" (and you had 3 opportunities per game to abuse this) was an almost unloseable strategy against probably all bar 4-5 characters, I am almost just as certain that Smash today would be entirely different, and how Brawl is looked back upon would be entirely different. We would've likely maintained popularity for a lot longer too.
But at the same time, a lot of what made the Brawl narrative so amazing to many was in fact due to Meta Knight.
If we banned MK really early, would've japan followed suit? Would we be struggling years later to bridge the West and Japan like is commonplace now?
If that occurred would we have had probably the single best set in smash history (Apex GFs, Salem vs Mew2King)?
Would "heroes" like MikeNeko, or Salem's performance at said Apex, or uhhh, a certain Snake main, etc etc ever been as emotive or powerful without the dynamic MK forced upon us?
Mew2King's legend of dominance could really only be mildly compared to ZeRo in S4, how he affected our lives was... something else.
Smash today would be incredibly different, the result as is might've been for the best.
In general for most national voting, if a referendum occurs and its a 50.1/49.9% split, the former wins, and once the pain and doomsday calls of the latter are actualized as falsehood, terms like "everyone" or holistic implications become a lot more common place. Most agree MK killed Brawl, whether you'd get the strong "No"-ers (like M2K) to agree he should've been banned is another thing, but 'if he never existed in the first place things would've been better' is an almost everyone opinion out of the social groups that I am/was involved with, at least.
just can't seem to get rid of the "amazing at regionals, eeeeeehhhhhh at majors" stink he has on him, with not a single Ness breaking top 48 (Gackt placing 49th is pretty good, though); BestNess dropping didn't help things at all, but in terms of meta development, Ness has probably been one of the most stagnant characters in all of Ultimate.
