It took me 2 days to unlock all the characters.... It didnt seem as fun, but to each their own.
Honestly, I agree. A sense of advancement and progression in games is one of my favorite things -- it's probably why I love the Metroid and Zelda series, and similar games -- and unlocking all of the characters in Melee was such a satisfying thing for me. In Brawl it still felt a little satisfying because I did some of it outside the SSE, and even with the ones I did unlock via that, it still felt like you were doing something to unlock that character specifically. Smash 4's method was just really boring for me and took no time at all. Unlike with Melee and Brawl, with a decent gap in multiplayer matches to unlock the next character, it hardly makes sense to do anything but that in Smash 4.
That kind of thing certainly has its benefits, like if you lose your data somehow, and I know not everybody gets enjoyment out of having to unlock everything, so this is purely based on my opinion. But I wish there were more effort required to unlock characters, like an actual concerted
effort, and not just playing with your friends for a little while (or doing 1 stock high damage ratio handicap matches for 30 minutes on your own). Granted, Melee is one of my favorite Smash games (I haven't played it since I got 4, so I've yet to see how it stacks up to that for me, but it was my favorite before that), but I've gone through and re-unlocked all of the characters and stages on Melee a number of times just for kicks. I mean, I could do without another Mewtwo, but otherwise I liked that system better.