Why do you think anyone needs to provide you with an in-depth character analysis that supports their opinion? Just as the creators of this tier list are entitled to their power of observation, so is everyone else here. A mere list in and of itself inherently lacks in-depth analysis as a part of its content to begin with.
Your logic on the flexibility of a tier lists creation also pre-dates that of more modern, scientifically-based reasoning. Generally, when you want to prove something you have ample data to provide (just as you're obnoxiously requesting from every user present). One single tournament isn't a viable data source to compile a consistency. It's like missing one hoop or one pitch and saying that player has a 0% shot/batting average. A tier list is meant to implicate a characters potential and tournament viability, a very important thing, so saying that it's too early is absolutely a viable and logical thing to assert. Simply because it is.
This post, as long and well articulated as it reads, is pretentious and full of inapplicable, rhetorical questions.
I believe you are mistaken. What I am doing is pointing out the 'pretensions' they make, the ways they say things, and the implications those modes of thought have that are contradictory. I grant that they have the reasoning behind their assertions, but they certainly don't present it in any way which makes implicitly consistent sense. This is why I quoted a few examples of good posts and showed why I thought they were good, consistent, and sensible, in that they disagreed yet had the proper dispositions and distinctions about things. I do not think them or you dishonest, I give the benefit of the doubt in taking for granted that you and them are in error instead.
This is probably a discussion for the debate hall subforum, but suffice to say that I label myself as a 'scholastic', and I'm betting you know this (intuitively, at least, probably not through that label), and so it seems that your point about "modern, scientifically-based reasoning" (which I label as 'logical positivism') isn't really directed so much at me as it is to anyone who might read your post. What's following is pretty much that, scholasticism vs positivism.
It doesn't seem that depth or shallowness is an inherent feature of lists at all. It's obvious that a list is the creation of analysis, that is analysis of some sort is a prerequisite, save for a completely random list, but even that implies the purpose of being random, in which case they are 'analysed' as 'man whatever just put them wherever'. With analysis itself is either depth or shallowness, but not with a list itself.
You make the same mistake, again, as the others have. Data is
not simply the quantitative numeric expression of some amount of wins. The reason it is illogical to apply strict 'wins' is because one must decide on an arbitrary quality of 'sufficiency'. It's as if they take a bunch of balloons and say 'okay if 43 out of 100 pop we can't say that they pop regularly but if 51 out of 100 we can say it'. Sure, that's a majority, but 'regularly' is a qualitative expression, not a quantitative expression, by its very nature.
Data is also understood as in qualitative data. Insofar as we are able to grasp the strengths and weaknesses of characters and are able to compare these things to the strengths and weaknesses of other characters, we gather qualitative information and can make logical conclusions that 'this character is generally better than that character'. What I assert is that there is such a thing as 'better', and that we can grasp the things that make one better than another by observation and using reason on the things we observe.
For example, we can observe that Ganondorf lacks significantly on options that are safe to attack shields with, and his dash grab is horrible, therefore we can conclude that he is worse than a character who can more admirably deal with shields if they have a comparable or superior game otherwise (all other things being equal, that is).
To quote Fritz Machlup, this seems to be the error you are making in reference to 'tournament wins':
"
Metromania, stemming from a fixation on the dogma that 'science is measurement,' takes the form of attempts to measure everything however faintly connected with the subject under investigation and to imagine the resulting figures to be relevant, and of urgent claims that any proposition not amenable to quantitative verification be rejected as 'unscientific.' The questions of the stability of computed numerical relations and of their historical relativity are usually ignored and ever-new statistical figures for different or longer time intervals are produced in order to devise 'corrected' parameters or coefficients "explaining" the measured magnitudes of social reality."
source (It's a great read if you want to get into my head about the subject at hand. And, as Machlup says, the data they produce is certainly useful or helpful in a lot of ways, but their views are, again, in error.)
It's the great debate between "Match-up based tier lists", which I am a proponent of, and "Win/loss based tier lists". We here in the Smash community have had both, usually the result of BR voting, and even hybrids of the two.
isn't nearly bottom. 
