What sometimes happens is we get a low tier player that's really good with an obscure character. I'm gonna use Cosmo as an example just because he was relatively recent. Cosmo would top 2-3 (usually 3rd) in Midwest tournaments a ton. He beat Kels once (nobody start **** over this, please, kthanx).
He would argue something like, "Zelda does <thing> against Fox". But then it would get shot down by a bunch of replies and gain support by others. It's hard to evaluate some of the low tier claims when they're in obscure regions because one of the big arguments (that I am guilty of using, sadly) was "Midwest sucks, strategy only works because Midwest sucks". This is extremely disrespectful to the strategist and generally just leads to a giant ****storm.
Cosmo, to my knowledge, never really expressed any frustration about this. But other high level low tier players have when I've asked them at major tournaments as to why they don't post on the boards. It's frustrating to have your ideas shot down in that kind of manner.
Having greater accessibility to these players (via online, closer proximity, etc) makes these strategies and characters easier to evaluate objectively. Encourages people to post without running into as many problems centered around things not related to the character or possibly outdated perceptions of the strategy and how it interacts with the modern environment (people playing a bad game of theorybros, basically). Creates more opportunity for viewing material, proper discussion (that isn't riddled with regional biases, etc), and so forth.
So it kind of bleeds into a bunch of the stuff I addressed but such is the nature of these kind of issues.