On one hand you say that even SF was never meant to be competiitve and ultimately a game is what the fans want it to be, not the devs which is 100% true. On the other hand in the paragraph before you dismiss Brawl for this very reason, because you think it's not intended to be competitive and is unhype. This is hypocritical.
Not being meant to be competitive is one thing, but Sakurai INTENTIONALLY sabotaged barlw to make it unplayable in a competitive environment. Why do you think they slowed everything down, made everyone floaty, made recovering retardedly easy, buffed virtually every aspect of dodging/shielding, and removed hitstun (and by consequence, combos and knockdowns)? Oh, and the most painfully obvious example, he made it so players randomly trip for no reason whatsoever.
If you think every Brawl set ever is boring to watch you either haven't been watching the right sets or are so narrow minded (like a lot of Melee only fans unfortunately) you have trained yourself to say pink is blue no matter what.
And before you give some random example of a boring match and try to say every Brawl match is like it, I'll point out that anyone can do this for any game. For example: Melee Apex 2012 GFs. With all the talk of Brawl being too slow and campy, I must say I have yet to see a Brawl set as long as that one. But it happened in Melee so it's okay right?
I've tried to watch a lot of barlw matches, and it's always been pretty boring. I'm sure there's a lot of nuance that goes into some of the decision making, but as far as entertainment factor goes, it has nothing going for it. There are no creative combos or followups, no crazy deceptive movement, no quick comebacks or 4 stocks of pure destruction. Does barlw have threads dedicated to amazing matches/combos? I'd be interested in seeing what barlw's most epic match looks like. It's funny people try to point to Hbox vs. Armada as proof that Melee is somehow equivalent to barlw. Two players out of the entire tournament choose to play campy as **** against each other, and that's about it. Even with the matches taking forever, there's still a lot of depth in what's happening. Hbox is constantly weaving through projectiles and Armada is constantly covering his weak points from approaches. It's easy to look at it and think it's nothing special, but any other Puff or YL on the planet would get tapped in a minute by either player.
For the record I like Brawl and Melee. And I started with Brawl first. I can see both having strengths and weaknesses for competitive play, I'll even go far as to say that Melee seems better in that regard. But dismissing every Brawl set ever as unwatchable is idiotic.
It's funny because the only thing casuals can understand about high level play in fighting games is ZOMG COMBOZ. If that's all you care about, you aren't too different from those that you mock. That's not to say Brawl doesn't have true combos, it just has less combo potential than Melee for obvious reasons.
Also, right now , the Brawl scene is more hype and it has nothing to do with gameplay. In Melee it's always the same 4 people coming out on top and the same matchups being played over and over. Brawl has far more active strong regions and as a result, a lot more than 4 people have shot at taking Apex this year which is more stacked than ever. This keeps it dynamic and interesting.
Your assumption that all Melee players care about is combos is hilarious. You also fail to realize how much depth combos and followups add to the game. You can't just dial-a-combo in Melee like you can in other fighters. DI and teching add so much depth, and it's sad to think that barlw has very little to none of that because of the reduced hitstun and airdodge mechanics, not to mention the extra lag on aerials.
barlw is more hype because anyone can win? Do you not see a problem with that logic? Maybe we should all just play RPS tournaments; there'd be A LOT more than 4 people with a chance at winning. The same 4-5 people win in Melee because you have to be really ****ing good at the game in order to even compete with the top players. As far as the same matchups being played, I find that hilarious coming from a community that banned a character because so many people were playing him. If I'm not mistaken, double Metaknight is still banned in teams to this day. Meanwhile, Melee has great character variety with a select few players placing pretty damn high even with the likes of ICs, Pikachu, Ganon, and Doc.
