So...
I had never played a Smash Bros. game before 2008. I got started with Brawl. It was pseudo-competitive play for the most part, because I hated items and liked neutral stages (without knowing that they were, indeed, neutrals), but we weren't doing any ATs, or stuff like that. I think it was around the winter of 2009 that a friend of mine gave me a GC, and a Melee disc as a birthday present. I played around with it, sure, but Brawl was still my thing, though I enjoyed Melee quite a bit.
Come 2010, I'm off to college. One of the first things I do when i get there is find the video game club. Sure enough, I found it. There is actually a subsection called "Smash Club" that I joined, where we played competitive Smash. Played Brawl there, trying to be competitive. For one reason or another, I can't really remember, the Brawl players got busy, and weren't coming to Smash club as much. So I started hanging out with the Melee guys, looking at their game, and starting to get into that more competitively. By this time, though, I still thought Brawl was superior. It took until about...maybe March or April of this year before I decided to drop Brawl (let's be honest, it's a terrible game), and go full on Melee. I think it's been a year since I started playing competitive Melee.