...and beyond the point where good players are able to get it 95-99% of the time anyway and up to the very best of players? Exactly, it offers next to nothing for depth and becomes no more than a superfluous button press for people that need to press lots of buttons and can't find other ways to get their fix in the game. Should we also make it so you need to tap the B button rapidly while holding A to charge smashes? That too provides another outlet for pressing extra buttons while also adding nothing at all meaningful to the game.
Also, in the rare instances someone does miss the cancel for the normal half lag who actually gets punished for it? It certainly wouldn't be MK and other fast characters that get little out of it anyway.
The fact that analog input on the L/R buttons doesn't even work like it did to do it in Melee and you need to press it down completely for it to register constantly makes it even worse of an idea imo.
The key is they only get it 95-99% of the time. When they miss it does matter a great deal, that's when they get punished for it. Also you have to consider that to keep a combo going it normally takes a perfect L cancel for every single hit and missing even one of those ruins it and a lot of times allows the opponent to retaliate. I could be playing Caveman for instance (I havn't traveled much) and he will still mess up his L cancels fairly regularly and not be able to combo me across the stage to my death like he would have been able to had he L canceled perfectly every time. Whereas when I play someone with better tech skill that doesn't miss their L cancel almost ever, they can get ridiculous combos on me across the stage or to my death and link things that I didn't even know could be linked. People should be rewarded for the insane amount of time and effort they put in in acheiving that level of tech skill. Also, very very few people ever did get to that super amazing level where they almost never ever messed up and this was over the course of what 7-8 yrs? As you get good you learn to see and capitalize on that one instance where your opponent messes up, but you desire to take that away from the game. Really L canceling does add quite a layer of depth to the game, dumbing it down is just.... wrong.
I should also point out that the current (balance of lack thereof) of the game is created with each move having it's set amount of lag. Yes there are many laggy moves and some that don't seem to have lag at all (kirby, samus, most nairs, etc) but if you look at those moves that have lag they tend deal more damage and knockback than those without. Now I'm all for having L-canceling in the game but to give it away for free is just trying to mess things up. Some complain that well those characters with hardly any lag already wouldn't get much of a benifit from L-canceling so why should we have to make them push a button for it, but that's what balances it...
As for fast characters not getting punished for missing L cancels, did you not play melee? Shiek, Marth, Fox all had very little lag to start with, as little as MetaKnight. Yes they could **** without L canceling and yeah it made them a lot better. But any and all of them would get serverly punished if they should ever miss, if they didn't then they were probably playing against a scrub. I could understand you saying that if you were opposed to L canceling completely... but not really as it was L canceling that allowed the other characters to still be playable and competative against them. But you aren't opposed to Lcanceling you want to autogive it to all characters, and the characters that would benifit the most from that are the ones that are already too good and have just that tiny bit of lag holding thim back, like MetaKnight.
If anything you should be argueing to keep L-canceling and simply make the timing more difficult.
Edit: You denounced what I said before but it's true that L-canceling is just fun. Jumping around the stage doing a bunch of cool stuff because you put in the practice to actually be able to pull it off adds a layer of fun and interest in the game for me. I could pick kirby in brawl and jump around and spam attacks as quickly as possible but this would do nothing for me. I would be utterly bored as all I'm doing is pushing jump and a C stick in a direction. There is nothing even remotely complex in this.
If you understand anything about human motivation and interest people like doing things that offer a little bit of a challenge to them (if a task is either too easy, or too hard people won't want to do it). Tasks with a moderate amount of difficutly are what keep people engaged. When people have to do something that they find boring and easy they will go out of their way to try to make it more difficult to challenge themselves and keep interest.
