On the other hand, it's a bit of a jerk-reaction to call the other person "elitist" when they say their game is better than yours. I mean someone who prefers Checkers over Chess may think Chess people are "elitist" if a Chess person comes over and says "yeah Checkers is a bad game (when compared to Chess)." Chess and Checkers are not the same game, but if someone likes Checkers but not Chess, you can't bring in an argument about whether Chess is better "game" than Checkers, because it's not about that. What happened when Brawl came out was that Nintendo basically slapped the Smash community in the face and ignored all of the things they liked: Brawl was designed to not promote competitive play (in the sense that neutrality, fairness, and control are valued so that players' mindgame and technical skills may be compared). Many arguments were made on both "sides", and none of them were good (that I saw).
For most Melee players, though, the argument is nonexistent because Melee players have for a long time let Brawl, Smash4 players play their game. The problem comes in when someone decides to be be vocal online and tries to tell a Brawl player that their game is better to try to bully them into playing their game or to try and show Brawl players that "their game is inferior." The thing is that for most Melee players, there's no argument whether Melee is a deeper or more complex game than Brawl because that argument was decided for us the day Brawl came out, but the elitist problem is caused by (and perhaps exists because of) the small minority of players posting online and being vocal about the whole thing. (Some leadership in the community would have been helpful at this time but no one in any position or 'authority' really said anything, polarizing or unifying.) M2K was actually someone who was helpful during that time because he wanted to focus on playing the game and so he promoted trying to get people to find ways around Meta Knight, I know that.
