There's a little too much talk about who is playing what character for my taste. The thing you guys have to realize is that a lot of tournament results are just popularity. You complain that only a few people do well with Pikachu, but what does that even mean? To me, all it means is that Pikachu is unpopular, but the success of the few is a nice demonstration that he can perform... though we have to always remember that skill gaps exist between players and that some characters can lack any good representation at all (especially low tiers). We have tournament statistics for the purpose of telling us what the current metagame is, but to me, a tier list is meant to represent how good the characters actually are to the best of our knowledge (which is theoretically independent of the current metagame). We can look at tournament results to inform us of certain things and certain possibilities and of course as a sanity check, but we have to rely on intuition and logic in the end to judge the merits of the characters. A big part of that is accepting that what we see in tournaments is just a random splattering with most player results being dictated by skill and character quality being a far secondary factor and that therefore we just can't get too caught up in who is doing what and how many and exactly how well.
