There is really nothing wrong with a little randomness in a competitive game. For instance, I would argue that random spawn points (a la Brawl) are way better design than controller port spawn points (a la Melee and Smash 64). Peach's turnips provide interesting gameplay that can really only be achieved by randomness (basically, if she only pulls a few, odds are she gets only minor good things, but if left alone and allowed to pull a ton, she is likely to get a bomb or beam sword which is extremely good for her). I feel several of the stages are similar to this, and that includes PictoChat in my book. Sure, the drawing is random (within certain limits that every player should know). However, unless you are just ignorant to the stage (and therefore don't try to work with the drawing mechanics, instead working "against" them) or deliberately try to put yourself in positions where bad things can happen, the odds of you actually losing a match to a random "surprise" are astronomical, in the league of tripping into Ike's fsmash on last stock or falling through solid ground on the handful of stages it has been documented to occur on. In any case, I've never seen any serious match dictated by any of that since, like I said, the odds are really just astronomical. I mean, yeah, excessive randomness can produce undesirable results, but randomness is no inherent evil. You just have to look at the sort of effects particular random elements have.
PictoChat's randomness is actually positive in another way though. PictoChat is a transforming stage, and it randomly transitions between 27 drawings with the "clear" form in-between each one. Obviously each drawing is in many ways a stage of its own, and the character advantages on each and every one are going to be different. This means the stage has an unpredictable character advantage, but the average character advantage over a match is pretty much guaranteed to be extremely tame. The way the order is random even prevents camping for your best forms from being a good idea since you have no guarantee they're coming so most forms are worth fighting as aggressively on as you do in general. All together, that is way better for fairness than the static character advantages that static stages give. It's also why PictoChat is a truly petty force on any stage list it appears on as anything but a starter. As a counterpick, there is no reason to pick PictoChat other than having a very strong personal synergy with the stage or advanced knowledge your opponent hates the stage (one of my favorite reasons to pick a stage). PictoChat is so exceptionally fair; why would you waste your counterpick on it when on essentially any stage list and matchup you are working with is going to have several stages more skewed in your favor? PictoChat is always legal around here, and it almost never gets picked. When it does, it's generally pretty tame, and even if random events favor one player a bit in a particular game, it's usually very obvious that them picking a better CP would have helped them even more.
As per circling being solved by subjective rules against running, the easiest answer is that any ruleset that requires matches to have the constant monitor of referees is defective by design. I am radical I suppose in thinking most (all I've seen) physical sports are terribly designed games for, among other reasons, the emphasis they place on skirting the rules in just such a way so the referee doesn't cry foul and can have their entire results plausibly changed by a biased referee. In a smash tournament, you could be intensely hated by the TO and every member of the tournament staff at any tournament and still win with only petty disadvantages against you (just don't be late for games and don't try to sneak stuff like IDC that others can get away with a little). Given that it's pretty much impossible for people not to be biased when asked to judge anything anyway, I think avoiding referees as much as possible should be one of our highest goals in making rules. Not to mention the fact that having a staff constantly monitoring every game is adding a ton of workload to a tournament staff to the point that you can't expect volunteers. You have to pay for that sort of thing, and no one wants that money coming out of the pot.
There's also the fact that run-away is a completely legitimate tactic in Brawl just as much as any other fighter, and it's flat out scrubby to punish it to try to force people into other styles such as rush-down or keep-away (that is, camping without moving much yourself). Why is "standing and fighting" better than "running and gunning"? The game doesn't suggest a way to play; the natural approach is to let everyone do whatever they want and favor that which the game declares the winner in the end (via the results screen). We regrettably have to make some rules to ensure there's some real gameplay, but we should strive to make as few as possible and have those be as non-intrusive as possible. Banning a few stages that are, by and large, terrible for a lot of reasons (the loop is really only the beginning of Temple's problems) is a lot less intrusive than dictating tactics. You also end up with flat out bizarre situations. Falco in general is going to like to run away and shoot lasers. It's just a good tactic with him on every stage. If you ban running away too much on loop stages, you end up making loop stages bad for Falco... when if he played on them like he plays on other stages they would be his best stages (against characters that can't run from him effectively). Extreme non-intuitive rule implications are another thing we should probably avoid just for sanity's sake if nothing else.
I mostly agree that walls are overrated in terms of being "broken", especially the walls on Corneria and Onett that have a lot of natural features in the stage that make them not really that exploitable. Shadow Moses Island is terrible for a lot of reasons (if you are smart here, you are practically unkillable in some matchups, like half the cast vs Sonic, as an example); I don't think it's a good representative of walls and definitely shouldn't be held as a model of how fair they are. To anyone who wants to pursue this further, I can really only wish you luck.
