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^^This. Like you, I had been using tap-jump on the control stick for 9+ years during my casual days. But as time goes on, you'll come to a point where you find that it'll hinder your progression, due to limiting your options (technically you'd be capable of the same things, but lots of things like short hopping, wavedashing short hopping with full/partial horizontal momentum, etc. will be so difficult to pull of consistently and throughout every match that the time/effort to master these harder versions just isn't worth it; it's an unnecessary setback). It might take just a short few days to get used to using X or Y (I would suggest Y; general consensus from our community is that it's better since it's closer to B than X is. X is otherwise just as good, and many top players [e.g. M2K, considered among the top 5 best in Melee, top...10/20? In Brawl, and prob top 5 for PM] use X primarily anyways, but it's still making stuff harder for no reason). I took 5 weeks of daily play to make the transition to comfortably+naturally begin to use X. Only real way to get it down is to just integrate it into daily tech practice, and getting as much practical experience using it during friendlies as you can (don't have to use it all the time from the start, but try to use it more and more every as the hours/days/weeks go by).
If anyone tells you that you can't be a high level player using tap jump to wavedash...Smash G0d and his brother Llod both use tap jump to wavedash. It just takes practice to be able to WD and DD. You may want to try using X or Y to jump for the WD, just to see if that works a little better, but don't feel like it's a necessity
It can be done, but it certainly isn't easy; there's a reason why there's not many people who have gotten as proficient as mid/high/top-level players using tap jump primarily. Some may get it down more easily than others, but doing so creates a lot of unnecessary difficulties that get in the way of improving as reasonably quick/efficiently as possible. Most come to the conclusion that spending a few weeks sucking and adjusting to using X/Y instead is worth the trouble in the long-run. It's obviously the player's own decision to do what he wants with what is said in the end, but...newer players should at least be warned about the potential hindrance it'll become, and that it's probably easier to transition to X/Y before you get too far learning too much tech to any degree with it. Sure it can be done, but you might end up wishing you swapped sooner or later down the line, and there's no real reason not to...besides getting annoyed at playing badly for just a month or a few weeks or so.
You can't really wavedash OOS in PM with two triggers, so you might as well get used to it.
This is what I did. Got tired of dying every time I went off stage because I forgot that I needed to press a button to jump. I learned pretty quick.
These videos are how I learned, and I forced myself to use Falco and would recommend others do as well. If I could do it with him, it became much easier to adapt to everyone else. Some people here disagree but it worked for me, YMMV.
Learning Fox and/or Falco will teach you all about the whole game just by itself.
