Characters like Fox and Falco are only the exception, and in matchups that actually matter, offense isn't even their best option.
By looking at what is usually the best option for the vast majority, no rather every character of Melee, it's probably a more fundamentally defensive game than Brawl due to the nature of light shielding, crouch canceling, dashdancing, wavedashing, and extremely strong universal ledge options. Sure breaking defenses is more rewarding, but the actual defenses themselves, as in options to repel offenses are in many ways stronger in Melee than they are in Brawl. The main reason to approach at all in Melee is the implied reward of breaking defenses (especially with grab combos, or edgeguards). Given that the reward of breaking defenses in Melee is usually very large, Melee is saved from being terrible and ends up being one of the better competitive games in existence, but that doesn't stop players like HungryBox from causing other players to potentially rage over this game.
Also Sliq, Brawl- has proven without doubt that more shieldstun to Brawl is not the solution at all. That actually makes the game MORE defensive, by weakening a fundamental approach option. Honestly Melee was extremely close to being a horrible game due to its shieldstun and shield drop time, except competitive players realized you could jump out of shield (the casual players who don't know that you can jump out of shield, now you know why rolling is a common bad habit). If there was ONE thing I would change to MELEE in specific, I would make shield drop time 10 frames as opposed to how it's currently around 14-15. It's unacceptable in my book that you can't simply tilt out of shield against punishable Smashes. That just makes the game unnecessarily hard to learn for newer players.
Most characters actually approach pretty easily in Brawl when we discount the fact that zoning options are extremely unbalanced between tiers (which I stress is the real problem with Brawl). Between approach being fundamentally easy to do in Brawl and lower reward than compared to Melee, it's a fair system if you ask me. Generally speaking camping with projectiles (unless you're Falco) is overrated in Brawl and easy for every character to bypass. And thankfully in Brawl there is no character nearly as outrageous as Melee Jiggs or Sheik (their Brawl counterparts are currently underrated characters, but that's a different story), although your associated top tiers are still overall pretty lame in this game.
