General Heinz
Smash Journeyman
It's easily a valid assumption to make. "Perfect" is meaningless. It's not clear what "perfect" would even mean in relation to smash.You're making an assumption that no player will ever play a game (from a technical standpoint) perfectly, which I do not believe is a valid assumption to make. You could argue, "Even top players mess up their spacing / wavedashing / ledgedashing now, 10 years into the game", which is true, but I believe that is a matter of pressure moreso than practice.
I will again say:
It's human nature to decry that which we find difficult, but ability is not limited, only effort.
Take a game like chess. With relatively few variables/options compared with smash, over time there has developed a correspondingly refined set of setups, more of less, such that in order to reach the upper echelons of play there's a lot of memorization of just the situations themselves, and the different ways of routing through them.
Of course the same applies in smash--certain strategies lead to certain situations with certain reliably consistent methods of retaliation, but the number of possible outcomes is astronomical just given the innumerably minute possibilities in spacing.
Also it's blatantly foolish to say ability is not limited. Your abilities are only that which is endowed upon your physicality, and ability is not invariant across individuals. That would be like saying what a human looks like now is the insuperable apex of all evolution that will ever or could ever take place. It's for this reason, the one that impacts the execution side the most (which isn't even present in chess), that I'm disagreeing with you.
Actually I'm not even really disagreeing with you on the main topic of powershielding, because I don't necessarily think/know that/whether powershielding is or isn't consistently doable because I haven't set to applying it really (I guess stylistically I prefer other options), but I can't help but take issue with the notion that all abilities are just a matter of time and effort. That's a patent falsity.
EDIT: I also disagree that it's all just muscle memory, because being a frame-precise input it will invariably change in timing based on distance.