Easy to learn too, unlike fox who takes conditioning to master. And don't tell me MK is hard to use, because he's not. Just spam your moves. That's all you have to do. Attack fast, attack furiously.
So wouldn't that make MK melee's Shiek, the character who is easy to learn how to use properly and is really good early on because people suck too much to do the really advanced techniques?
I think this whole discussion is pointless and arbitrary at this point. The real question is "how healthy is the metagame", and how to measure the health of a metagame is not even necessarily everyone can agree on.
The only real metric is "How many characters win what percentages of real tournaments?" You could also argue for "Number of banned characters", "Number of characters who never have won a major tournament", and "Number of banned stages".
-Inescapable CG's and some CG's that can't be escaped until certain percentages.
Right. Because, you know, those didn't exist in Melee.
Except for, you know, Shiek. And Ice Climbers. And Fox's waveshine. And...
-Brick wall tactics such as Tornado vs many moves
Because these never existed before. Except for, you know, stuff like the Air Fortress. Or shining. Or half of Marth's moveset.
-Characters strengths are based off natural selection. Character potential is stagnant.
No. This is blatently untrue and is the result of you knowing nothing about either game. Character potential is not stagnant in Brawl, and increases over time at a much faster rate than it is for Melee. Why? Because Brawl is not nearly as fully explored as Melee is.
-MK is dominant over every other character.
Arguable. And so much different from the situation at many points in Melee. Shiek, Marth, Fox... all were seen as the top character at one point in Melee.
-Broken hit boxes that extend greatly beyond physical character
Again, Melee had tons of these. Marth, for example.
-Difficult to get around projectile zoning.
Because SHLing didn't exist in Melee.
-Very little lag in between dodging
Oh no, dodging being a viable strategy? Whatever will we do? There's nothing unbalanced about this.
-Little to no punishment game
No. Just no.
-Biased character development
What is this even supposed to mean?
The reality is that this is a pointless argument. Brawl hasn't been out long enough to really have a good idea for it, and Melee was evolving for years and years. Whenever people point out a problem in Melee, people counter that it is because it has been out for so long. Its all pointless.
Quit arguing about this and play the game. That will give you a far better idea.