I really enjoy how it's pretty much a universal understanding that Geno is next in the Smash hierarchy. I was going through the wayback machine for the old Nsider forum and i'd say a solid 1/3 of the "most wanted" lists feature Geno pretty prominently. We're talking July of '07 before we even know any characters outside of the original Brawl trailer. He's up there with Wolf, Olimar (both of which were way more popular than I remember) and the [insert Fire Emblem character here, usually Lyn before Ike was revealed].
As I expected, you don't really see Banjo too often. People also didn't really seem to consider Geno 3rd party at the time, I think mostly because of Sakurai's comments on the matter.
Here's a funny screenshot of someone joking about there being 15 3rd party characters in a 100 character roster. We're only a couple off that 3rd party number now.
View attachment 229050