Cause let's face it, that's what happened, giving top tier more advantages and low tier less chances.
You do realize that Fox ***** everything that moves on most of the banned stages, right? A lot of stages are banned because of flat vertical walls give him an infinite and are just stupid in general.
I was gonna make this thread after watching APEX 2013. Laijin beat me to it. I was wondering what happened to all the good stages.
Then restrict it to one character too. Why stop at stages? If we "really" wanna see who the "best" is, we need to have Fox only on Final Destination.
People are presenting strong logical arguments; you are simply electing to ignore them. It looks like all the haters ended up being right about Melee. I used to proudly proclaim to those haters that it was easy to strike Final Destination (which I often did) and that I fought there in a tiny minority of tournament matches. It looks like we're gravitating back toward the mindless grind of who can use space animals the best.
As has been mentioned already, stage variety is good just as character variety is good. It is an extra layer of complexity that adds beauty to the competitive element in this game. Stop comparing smash to other fighting games. If you like other fighting games so much, go play other fighting games. Personally, I am here because Melee is so different. The freedom to move about the stage is fantastic and makes for epic competition.
Ok I knew someone would bring up "just use one character"
When stages were initially banned, we opened a sort of Pandora's box at that point. What we as a community said was "this game is not competitive in its inherent form and we as a community must now decide what is best for the game". This is perfectly reasonable, because Melee with every stage is stupid. I'm pretty sure everyone agrees with this.
The problem is, by admitting that even ONE stage is too jank to play competitively, we are admitting that there is a stage that is the LEAST jank. That's simple logic. And the jankness of a stage is a real thing that really affects how much it facilitates desired competition (unlike characters, but I will elaborate on that after this). So, simply by admitting that any stage is too jank to play on, all of a sudden we have opened ourselves to the reality that there is a least jank stage. Now as a competitive community that is trying to take itself seriously, how can we NOT strive to get to the point where we know that one stage? I see our current stagelist as simply the finalists in the community's view of the "best stage", and that the decision for the actual best one is simply impossible to come upon. And I think that, besides PS, we HAVE reached the point where we have gotten down to the most purely balanced and competitive stages in the game. There is no NEED for the stages banned other than the sake of variety now that we, as a community, have admitted that stages are more or less jank than one another.
When it comes to characters, we have never banned one nor has the community ever felt the need to. At no point have we seen character variety as in opposition to desired competition, whereas we HAVE seen stage variety as such. There is no reason to limit it to one character; nobody has ever thought such.
And this is no personal attack, but nobody cares about what you think is "beautiful" and "epic". If you want those things, go play Okami or Shadow of the Colossus or whatever. This is a competitive game that very often has decent amounts of money on the line; while it is being played for fun, the fact still stands that it is illogical to add stages to the stagelist that have been logically banned before.
And how are we gravitating towards who can use spacies the best? I'm pretty sure only like three spacies users made top 8 at Apex (one of which was Mango, who ***** with every character, and the other was PP who didn't even use Falco in GFs). If anything people are gravitating AWAY from spacies because now everyone is learning how to **** them.
That's what I've been saying for more than 5 years so yeah 
