no one's making melee out as hard to learn, but the metagame goes a lot deeper than brawl does. granted it doesn't go as deep as traditional 2d fighters, but i like to think of it as a different kind of depth.
and dyno, that is a terrible fake john that seems to be the standard argument and belief for defenders of brawl.
in my case, i tried very very hard to like brawl. with GAWes and Tom both enthusiastic about it, I received motivation through osmosis as well as self-injection. However, as time went on, I couldn't really have fun with it. It was a soulless husk of the game I love, Melee. Granted, it's a different game than Melee, but it's different (at least, to me) in the same way that being a reanimated corpse would be to a living person.
It's just not right.
also, yeah. west coast has a loooot of good brawl players, but they all agree
BARLW SAX
also, ssb64 with a gamecube controller is fun as hell.