Especially looking at that chart theres a huge amount of character that fall behind the very best.
Yes and no--it's really important to understand the nature of this data and the trends that feed into it.
All results data tends to be driven by a handful of top players. Even in wide-scope weighted results like OrionRank, in the most extreme cases an upper-tier character can have as much as a third of their results driven by a single player. In other words, a large amount of the character positions at the high end are reflecting the performance of 1-2 top players, a relationship impossible to control for objectively.
But what about characters like Wolf, Snake, ROB, or Palutena, that dominate the charts through dozens of regional players? This is not the work of a single player, but it is a reflection of a single
metagame being advanced forward. Every rising competitive Lucina player is a search away from two dozen top-level VODs of Lucina vs. any opponent in the game.
For these reasons, I would normally plot OrionRank logarithmically, which would put less emphasis on the "noise" of top level characters. However, I wanted a linear correlation for that graphic (to make those colored polygons), so I presented the data raw here.
I Also wonder if the expert smash players that helped balanced this game knew every character well enough. In the perfect world I would think you would take the best players of those characters and get their input on what to change or leave as is.
This is a natural concern--it is seemingly this bias that led to MK in Brawl. (Only 4 top level balance testers, MK happened to be the one they all sucked with.)
However, too many cooks in the kitchen leads to a hot mess. Design by comittee is
so bad; this cannot be overstated. At some point in your life you will find yourself in a situation where you learn this first hand, and it's unlikely anything I say will spoil the impact of that experience.
Aiming for top level play is like aiming for the center of the bullseye--a good idea regardless of your specific goals. However, aiming for the whims of
individual specific top players is asking for trouble. This is an eccentric bunch with strong opinions that are biased by their (outlier) set of skills and the specific dynamics with their equally eccentric peers. They, like most players, tend to have weird biases about the characters they play, yet these biases aren't even consistent and vary wildly in magnitude based on personality.
Whether it is top players or the most casual players, people don't know what they want. This is true in most fields. In fighting game balance, this usually manifests in the form of a gradient towards homogonization--a slippery slope towards making characters more similar. It's natural, isn't it? If character A works but character B doesn't, why not just make cahracter B more like A? It's the fastest and most reliable solution, but it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
People will endlessly ask for Mac to be better in the air, for Doc to have a better recovery, for Sheik to have better kill moves, for Ganon to have better frame data. All of these are pretty poor ideas. People wanted Falcon's quirky mobility "fixed", but instead they made Raptor Boost reward consistent--they made Falcon more Falcon, not less.
This is a common trend with the approach of all balance changes this team has done. It's not quite accurate to say that they "increase a character's strengths"; most of the focus has been on removing flaws, obstacles, or situational barriers in the way of a character's strengths. Great examples:
- having the best power-per-startup-frame in the entire roster, and being given a d-tilt that links into his combo tree and/or kill move.
- Revenge being a solid answer to anyone trying to outcamp his poor mobility with projectiles, and being given superior range+timing on success so that the fastest characters like Pikachu have a smaller range where dash grab coverage exists.
- having great defensive option behind her mine, and being given better timing + consistent activation so that fast enemies cannot just run over it or rush her down.
- vertical aerial combos being really potent, and being given a late hitbox on side-b that sets those combos up on people who threaten to zone Falco out.
- Phantom; pretty much everything about it, really.