Well unfortunately your post came off rather self-indulgent and also a bit "holier than thou"
This is about to get very off topic, forgive OP -
I'm a Software Engineer, I am recently coming to grips with the fact that maybe my job is making many long standing trades and jobs now obsolete, and it's not positive. Basically I along with the CEOs and big wigs absorb the lower levels incomes as they are put out of a job thanks to automation, robotics, and systems engineering. It's actually quite sad and it's created this weird limbo where people want to work and be a contributing part of society but they are being displaced by machines that cost more upfront but less in the long run. Now 5 people make all the money; more money than they can even spend, where 100 people used to share it.
I actually do think it's a terrible idea to automate everything. Let's say they invent some kind of country wide pneumatic tube system to deliver packages anywhere. Think of all the postal workers put out of a job, instead one postal engineer would be in charge of upkeep in a sector and the initial engineers gets paid all the wages of the fired employees to install and invent the system. The upper tiers of the postal companies would save more money in the long run which would go into their pockets. Now they can finally afford 5 houses and 2 summer homes, meanwhile a large sector of people become unemployed and can't even afford to pay rent. It offsets the entire economy, these people don't have any other choice than to hope for charity since they have no means of making money and putting it back into the system. A very big question we need to start asking ourselves is "Okay we can do that, but should be". Like if we discover immortality, cures for all diseases, or the ability to live to 300 years old. Well that leads to overpopulation, then shortage of resources.... and eventually having to kill off some of the population or limit births, etc.
If the future is that robots do everything for us and we don't have to work....besides customer service and the arts. Transitioning there is the problem because in that future money will slowly lose all value since less and less people actually work or at least a very LARGE part of the population doesn't work. We will have to find new ways to be contributors in society, to earn our way or to fend off the inevitable socialist economic structure where all is spread across equally.
I definitely see how I came off that way. I should have toned it differently.
Oh, cool. I'm actually in school as an Electronics Engineer. I'd like to get into robotics, but my job atm is mostly tech-level work (right-hand man to a few engineers who may need testing on some new power-saving algorithm or need some other data) and writing automation for tests. I admit, if I'm not careful, it's possible I could write myself out of a job. If I handled things properly though, it would more likely lead to promotion or a better role. However the space I left behind would be gone. So this sort of example, and what you're talking about, look like general divides might occur between the rich and poor over time. But it doesn't look like that's really true or happening. Check out ~44:54 to 48:34 in
this video, or you could immediately jump more to my point at
46:25, where he goes into individual income distribution (if you have time and are somewhat interested, I'd actually recommend the whole video; I thought it was pretty good). Those graphs (you'll see the Americas in green) show that income distribution is really very stable, and the bigger picture even has a shrinking & merging divide. That's over the last 50 years, certainly a prime time of rapid technology & automation growth.
That fact seems counter-intuitive to what we were just saying. But I think probably a big part of the reason for this ability for the economy to remain pretty stable is innovation. Particularly in countries like the U.S. where science/technology innovation has probably been one of our best assets for staying strong in the global economy. Innovation just keeps going. As jobs disappear, new jobs are created around the new systems or ways of life. Likely, it's just not easy to predict change like that because we don't know or don't immediately think about what innovation will appear, and instead, all we can easily see is what's about to disappear.
Maybe one thing that could make this pattern difficult to maintain is that the new people coming in need more education. Though thanks to the Internet, self-teaching has really been taking off these last 5 or so years, being both incredibly cheap and accessible. I mean, self-teaching via the Internet has been around a lot longer than that, but recently it's become more organized, even with classes and official degrees. Traditional public education could use some work, but it still has a lot more going for it than people give it credit for, largely in terms of scholarships and other financial aids that people don't take advantage of (usually because they don't know they exist).
You're essentially arguing that the consequences need to be considered, which is totally valid. But I'd say that that consideration would be included in the scope of the "fixing" process. So if you foresee some problem or the gains don't outweigh the work, you can just stop there. But simply asking questions about things is principally a good thing, right? And I would say the consideration of change, or of "fixing" a working status quo, essentially begins by just asking questions about that status quo. Why it's good/bad, what if A or B was different, etc (pretty much what this thread was meant to be). So I still think the axiom from my original quote is completely non-constructive, and even perhaps less than that. Since like I said, it feels a bit snide, as if the line of thought, just the consideration of "fixing" (or more generally just changing, or thinking 'what-if-change' of something), is somehow wrong and that that wrongness should be self-evident.
I would be okay with tweaks to the characters, but the physics engine should be left alone. this would make the most sense for a remaster, anyway, because Melee wouldn't be Melee if they changed anything.
They should leave Fox as he is, with only minor nerfs to his firefox and uair, and usmash maybe. Leave the shine intact. The ideal redux of Melee would attempt to have the other characters brought up to Fox's level of utility. If you just go around nerf-bombing superior characters like they do in Sm4sh for the most part, the result will be a frustrating meta where your hits don't feel satisfying. They should give some minor buffs to other high tiers, major buffs to frame data and hitboxes to mid tiers, and then completely rework the low tiers and unviables. The process should be overlooked by playtesters from the Melee community (so they have a familiarity with the engine and can hone in on imbalances quickly).
They probably wouldn't need to add any new characters because the reworking of the low tiers would make them new again, but if they really wanted to show us Melee fans thanks for our dedication, they could add in some of the characters that were thought about but later scrapped in the game's initial development cycle. Guys like Sonic, Goldeneye James Bond (lol yeah right), DDD, Mach Rider, Wario, BK would all be nice.
Stages should be redone so that you can choose the original map from Melee, or a more traditional variant (please, more than just FD). They don't have to spend much effort to turn stage hazards off, which would likely make some original stages tourney-viable again. They don't have to spend any time on music, just give us the option to toggle between some good selections that Smash has had over the years. Any new stages would be nice, especially any FE rep.
That's all I can think of. Did I miss anything?
Sounds like you might like SD Remix. If you don't know about it, it's basically a full game mod that does what you're describing; no mechanics changes, no changes to top tiers, but proportional buffs to the rest of the cast so they're more viable. Mostly it's pretty conservative though, which is good, and means that characters still operate very similarly to how they do in vanilla Melee. Some stuff is pretty cool, like giving Samus a non-multi-hit upsmash that is actually worth trying to use in gameplay. Or slightly improving shield size on large characters that are constantly shield-stabbed.
Also, a lot of stuff you're mentioning will be available in the new 20XX. Like more stages, the option to toggle stage hazards on/off, the ability to set up different (custom) music for different stages, and more.
