This part I mean. Like it sounds like "Make a line not look like a line and it becomes nonlinear."
It's a gross simplification of the goal, though. The game is still non-linear because the path through the game isn't explicitly laid out before the player; they have to find it based on their ability to recognize patterns in the world, and on their exploration. In a sense, the player drives their own progression. If the designer is really good (like the guy who designed Redder), they can allow for multiple paths through the game, but still keep the solution to the overall puzzle more or less the same. In the end, it's still the player that tells the story. The aspect of non-linear games that makes them so deep is that you're allowed to create a more complex goal than "find a point somewhere to the right and beat the final boss." In that light, enemy placement becomes unimportant.
I'm just saying that basing your judgement of non-linear games on enemy placement and the difficulty of the platforming is naturally going to make them look bad, because that's not what they're about at all. When you say they're all bad because of their enemy placement and platforming, you should wholly expect to be called ignorant.
I think a high learning curve is a weakness. Difficulty for all practical purposes is equivalent to consistency, in a game where you don't have the luxury of being inconsistent. We can theorize what a character can potentially do, and in many cases it is good to push those limits for the sake of innovation, but it is certainly a bad idea to attempt innovation in a tournament setting. I dare argue that if you can control an extremely difficult character that the character is no longer difficult by definition.
Additionally, nonlinear characters like Fox/Falco strongly encourage sub-optimal decision-making in a match and it is hard to determine the correct choice simply because of the sheer amount of alternatives available. These imperfect decisions lead to momentum shifts and are a great way to get killed in general. DoH once jokingly proded at me with "What's wrong, too many options?" and he scoffed a little but then I said "Actually, yes." and I think he immediately understood what I was getting at.
Even if it can be considered a weakness, it's a weakness that's only as damaging to a character's success as the player playing them. It's not a weakness that affects each player of the character equally. For instance, every Ganondorf player has to work around the fact that he has very few safe options for escaping pressure. No matter how good you are at keeping all of Ganon's options in your head, that one factor will limit you just as much as it limits someone picking up Ganon for the very first time. For Fox, this is not the case. He's only as bad as the player playing him. And in Fox's case, it's the only weakness that isn't totally overwhelmed by his strengths. In the end, it makes this so called weakness pretty insubstantial.
