I'd agree with the clickbait assessment; "dead" really isn't an accurate word to use here and it's been tossed around an uncomfortable amount of times since the announcement. "Out of development", maybe?
But whatever, this is a really interesting question. My own answer would really depend on what stage of development you caught the game in, but right now I'd have to say that having a stable meta is going to end up being a very good thing, regardless of some unfixed issues. In almost any earlier build, if confronted with an option to stop there, I would have said no way. That's not a super popular opinion what with 3.02 being considered by a lot of people to be "the fun build" and all, but I think that assessment comes mostly from people without a ton of experience in high enough levels of competitive Project M where all the obnoxious flaws in 3.02 were glaringly apparent. Not that 3.02 wasn't a blast (coughtwobananascough), and a pretty damn good shot at a Smash game, but the process of Project M's development was basically a six-year study in game design examining a type of game that had never really been put under a microscope in this way before. That's what fascinates me so much about Project M to begin with, and it's a big part of the reason why it's still my favorite Smash title.
To this day, I'm convinced not even Sakurai and his team have put as much time, effort, blood, sweat, tears, assorted bodily fluids, etc. into really buckling down and examining what makes competitive Smash so great than the Project M dev team. I mean, nobody can really deny that the Melee community has done more research, analysis, data mining, theory crafting, matchup discussion, meta discussion, mentality discussion, number-crunching, set analysis, game analysis, interaction analysis, move analysis, stat cataloging, frame data cataloging, tier speculation, and actual match-playing than anyone would have ever imagined to go into such a goofy party game for kids. But that's still a pretty far cry from sitting down and saying "All right, let's make a Smash game". Let's distill everything great about it into one streamlined unit, fix what flaws we can, prime it for healthy meta development, bring two historically divided communities together over the best aspects of each, and make something awesome that everyone can enjoy. Let's bring together everything we love about Smash (and sure, there's a lot of Melee in there, but every Smash title has something, some essence that went into Project M). And then, when it isn't perfect the first go around (and it won't be), we'll work on it more and touch it up. And then after a while we'll do it again. And again. And again.
Indefinitely, though? Jesus. Imagine?
Development was six years. That's longer than a lot of triple-A titles I can name. And while I'm bordering on what sounds like hero-worship here, we can't kid ourselves: the devs that worked on Project M were a phenomenally talented group of people. I'm still kind of amazed that we have the game we have. And we as a community had basically nothing to go on but our own love of Smash. I want to make this clear: there was no template. There was no fighting game title like Smash, and no Smash title tailored specifically to be played in a competitive setting. To try and build one, even off of a canvas like Brawl with a reference engine like Melee, was a pretty crazy endeavor. We still don't fully understand all of the interactions in a fast-paced game comprised of billions of little interactions. It would take a lot of brainpower. So maybe, given long enough, we could have had what we conventionally imagine to be a totally balanced game? I mean, obviously there were conflicting opinions among players and devs that would never really be settled. But it's generally agreed upon that 3.02 was more balanced than 3.0, 3.5 was more balanced that 3.02, and 3.6f is more balanced than 3.5. So at least we had a pretty good trend going. Maybe we could have gotten there, but we would have needed to sacrifice a lot. All of Project M's life up until this past winter has basically been all tournament results invalidated after a year, disagreement over any kind of stagelist, character metas and matchups essentially needing to start over on a cycle every time an update rolled out, all that. That was pretty good while the game was in early development, but it couldn't have been sustainable. Project M will never shake this stigma it has of 'not being a real Smash game' if we never sit down and eke out a consistent meta. At what point are we good enough, you know? 3.02 had its issues (and admittedly it had a lot of non-balance-related, Brawl-esque toxicity issues that Melee didn't have), but even it was arguably more balanced in terms of characters than Melee. 3.5 was even more balanced than that. 3.6f is nowhere near perfect, but I have yet to see a perfect video game. And more work has gone into polishing the flaws Project M has than any other Smash title. If there were ever a time to trade the promise of the next update being just a bit better and just a bit prettier for the same kind of stability that Smash 64, Melee, and Brawl have had for years, imo this was the time to do it and this was the build to do it on.
And can we live with the flaws? I mean, yeah. We play Smash Bros. One of the most popular competitive stages in Melee features a big stupid tree right in the middle that literally blows people around if they're standing on the wrong half of the stage, and everyone loves Dreamland. Whiffing a tether grab on one specific part of Bowser's Castle, whether that becomes a common occurrence or not, is still pretty preferable to getting sucked beneath Battlefield's haunted ledge and dying for no reason. Yoshi's hitboxes might be a little funny (I admittedly don't understand this problem as well as I'd like to), but he doesn't have throws that do literally nothing. We might not have fixed star KOs the way we wanted, but at least our characters don't fall over for no reason. Diddy Kong might be kind of silly, but he's no Melee Fox or Brawl Metaknight. Smash players deal with the flaws in a game that was never meant to be competitive to begin with; it's what we do. And the flaws in Project M are far easier to put aside than some of the flaws in Melee or Brawl. Especially balance flaws. I mean, yeah, there are more than a couple characters that we didn't have quite to where we wanted them. Given enough time, could we maybe have made a game with 820 (I did lazy math and someone is definitely going to tell me I'm wrong but screw it this number's going here anyway) completely even matchups? Sure, at a cost of stunted meta growth for an indefinite number of years. But do we even want a game like that? Do we want a game that doesn't have all of the spirit that our low-tiers have, all the personality of a cast with strengths and weaknesses, all of the uneven matchups we've seen go toe-to-toe and cheered on in tournament and been saddened when the favorite triumphed again or been deeply impressed when the underdog stuck it out? Just this past weekend at a major Project M tournament I saw a Kirby fthrow a Fox offstage at 150% and try and combo it into a down-b. It missed the Fox and got him killed, but that play had so much goddamn heart that I made an audible sound. Tetraflora once wrote a guide saying you need to play Kirby with heart, and that Kirby definitely read that guide. And I'm fully aware that it sounds kind of silly to defend a character's design issues on the basis that they have something like "heart", but the Kirby mains don't seem upset enough to quit Kirby. Project M characters have flaws that maybe could have been addressed, and I would be stupid to argue against that. But there isn't a single flaw in Project M (at least so far) that is so oppressive as to totally shut a character out of the meta like in Melee, Brawl, or even Smash 4. Maybe our tier list isn't where we wished it could have been, but as far as I'm concerned we addressed what we set out to address.
This is an exciting year for Project M. Major tournaments are occurring almost on the regular for the first time in its lifespan. Regions and players are starting to be established as threats. Tier lists are starting to solidify. We have a pretty well-agreed-upon ruleset in the Nebraska Nine. People are rolling out new tech and theory-crafting. People are establishing streams, websites, guides, and info hubs. People are starting to commit to developing the meta for characters now that they know they won't be changed—hell, the announcement came when I was having kind of a main crisis and it inspired me to commit to Ice Climbers, a character I now love to death. This is the kind of thing that happens and will continue to happen when people aren't just waiting on the next update. A year ago I'd have been skeptical about ending things where they are, but as it happened this past winter, my opinion has changed. There's no way to say for sure what will happen, but I predict that it will be a very good thing.
tl;dr Yeah, this game is pretty cool. I love it and this community lots and lots. That's my two cents.
