Yeah, I still don't understand Verge. He was correct on all the base stuff. And his rumor about Minecraft made me think with Microsoft's involvement, B&K could happen--and they did, but it was done after his leak, and Minecraft or Microsoft stuff outside of B&K and Cuphead didn't happen. Despite those datamined Rare spirits that went no where (so far). It's all confusing to me still.
While it was misread, to answer that question genuinely... As a kid I genuinely could not tell the difference between all the human characters, when there's all these colorful, different shaped/designed characters all around. Characters like Mario and Luigi are more differentiable because they're more cartoonish and exaggerated. Even Shulk, who I now respect their design, just looked like another "human character." Snake, while a human, was identifiable because of how unique he was in being this mature, modern military guy, but hung out with these colorful characters and had cartoonish elements to his actions. It's all about expectations, and how new information is incorporated.
While Shulk's design grew on me as I got older, unfortunately all the FE designs still come off to me as uninspired and same-y medieval swordsmen design, where often the non-protagonists look more interesting than the ones in Smash. The fact three out of eight characters have blue hair (and Byleth's Smash design looks more blue-ish than green-ish) doesn't help that. People can tell the difference if they care to look close enough--but there's no reason to if you're not a fan of that series. Now I have been able to tell the differences, but only because I look at, share, and manipulate Smash character art a lot... prior to that, yeah they looked like "blue haired anime swordsmen." The fact one's muscular and one's slender is a minuscule difference compared to the more basic, superficial elements. Even Marth vs Lucina--obviously they're a different gender, but to a non-fan the question is, "Out of all the characters, why do they all have to have the same superficial appearances?" JustJesss did a good video on that topic just the other day.
I have the same bias against another fire/water type Pokemon being in--there's so much variety to choose from (in both FE and Pokemon), but the ones that get in Smash, on a superficial level, look the same, or have the same basic attributes. But, it is what it is, and I respect the fans of FE to get the characters they want in--not mine, since, I'm not the audience for those characters.
: Amy 
