Smash isn't having an identity crisis, the people who weren't prepared for a greater focus on third parties are. It's fine that's not your preferred direction for the series, but that reflects on you and not the game. Sakurai has been nothing but confident in his development of the game and incorporation of more third parties in recent years with emphasis placed on gaming crossover instead of just a Nintendo crossover. There's no wavering in his understanding of the game's identity, and some fans perceiving it less positively does not change that. Not to mention, the massive sales of the game and the implied sales of the first Fighter's Pass are communicating massive approval for Smash's continued direction. The negativity behind third parties in Smash almost exclusively comes from individual forum goers. It's a crossover that includes all kinds of beloved characters across gaming that originally started as a Nintendo crossover and retains most of that original content.
As for what you do or don't know in Smash, you're also afforded your own personal preferences, but I feel like people don't recognize just how diverse an install base of almost 20 million people is going to be in terms of preferences. If you have any slightly more restrictive preferences, it's entirely possible for you to go an entire couple seasons worth of DLC without getting stuff you prefer because the game is branching out and appealing to so many types of people. You don't have to be more open to new experiences and you can say that you've seen enough from little content to say you have no interest, but you are inherently choosing to limit your potential enjoyment of the game and the potential for discovery. You have to own your tastes and acknowledge they won't always get catered to when a product this wide reaching is trying to satisfy tons of people and wildly different groups.
And it's especially frustrating for me personally to see some people speak to how much they loved Smash for introducing them to new first party franchises they didn't know about, but then saying they're unwilling to explore new third parties that Smash is offering them. In general, I find some sections of Nintendo fans who have a tendency to deify them as a company and claim all their work is good and worth exploring, while other games are less compelling, and that has always felt like an unnecessarily restrictive lens to view the world from. There are a variety of third parties that actually straight up embody Nintendo's best impulses better than Nintendo can at times, and we see some of those in the game third party wise and then there have been first party titles and even franchises that I would argue aren't particularly great or compelling either. Smash is just attempting to introduce people to new series and satisfy existing fans of that series, same as always, you just happen to not be in the priviledged seat of being directly appealed to at that moment.
Your opinion when you know next to nothing or haven't tried the game isn't invalid, but it can be worth less, and if you're coming to something as inherently discourse based as a Smash forum, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect others to actually try and learn a bit more. If you have a class discussion on a topic and you didn't do the reading, you're voice is inherently not going to contribute as much to the conversation at hand sort of thing. Especially a thread like this with an eye for speculation in general practically demands you do more leg work to discuss the topics at hand I would argue.
