Hey everyone, I kinda forgot that there was a thread on this, but I did some research on stagelists out of my own curiosity, and can give kinda the statistical end of this stuff for you guys.
List suggested directly above above: The starters aren't super well balanced, because they are biased towards large blast zones on both the sides and the top, as well as towards longer stages. There are two walls of the 5 stages, which is standard for all the stagelists I've reviewed. It's possible to balance out the size zones better, but I've yet to see a list that is able to successfully balance the top zones and length better than average. The overall list is actually very well balanced, barring a slight bias towards big side zones(4 big, 2 medium and 3 small), but the starters aren't that well balanced and bowsers brings its own set of problems that I'm sure you're all familiar with. Statistically this list works out about the same as the paragon list(a little better on balancing the top zones on the full list, but otherwise basically identical).
The best list that I've seen currently in use(based on how well it's mathematically balanced) is the norcal list, which is just paragon but with dreamland as a starter and delfinos as a counterpick. Of course this doesn't alleviate many of the issues listed above, and creates even wider average blast zones among the starters, but it does help to better balance the stage length among starters, so that's something.
Based on going through a ridiculous amount of stage combinations, here's the list that I'd personally favor(take that as you will).
Starters: Green Hill Zone(or Fountain of Dreams if you prefer, the only difference is a far longer bottom blast zone and a middle platform rather than a triplat), Smashville, Battlefield, Pokemon Stadium and Distant Planet.
Counterpicks: Final Destination, Fountain of Dreams(or Green Hill if you swapped the two), and Wario Land.
Admittedly a bit of an odd list, so let me explain why the numbers worked out that way. As mentioned above, virtually every stage list is skewed towards longer stages with high ceilings, and this is no exception, but it is less extreme. The use of DP as the "big" stage means a smaller ,although still large, ceiling, which helps to offset the fact that there is only one starter with a notably low ceiling. The side blast zones are actually statistically perfectly balanced, with one small and one large stage(GHZ and Battlefield respectively), and the rest being relatively average. There is an average mixture of walls and platform configurations, although admittedly there is a concern with the stages still being longer than average, this is no different than with any other combination of starters that I've seen.
The reason for excluding both Dreamland and Delfinos is to avoid having the stagelist skewed towards large stages, which as you've all noted above, is the tendency in many stagelists. Instead, when you take the entire list into consideration, you have a balanced mixture of top, side and bottom blast zones, walls, platform configurations, stage lengths, etc. The balcony is actually running a very similar list tonight, with the addition of Delfinos as a counterpick, so hopefully that can provide some feedback on how this may work(although with a smaller list overall without delfinos).
This is all based on the stage data that's available here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LJ2IRbVIcEYajsqt95JMQOPKKpsqfDzo5ZgfJvbdlg4/edit#gid=0
My apologies for such a long post. I didn't mean to write this much, but I've been thinking about it for awhile, and wanted to explain my thought process after the work I've done, so I hope it's useful to you all.
