Reasons why Melee is better: (A discussion that should not be in this thread, but has been building towards this post anyway...)
Character balance: (or the lack there of)
In melee, there was this kind of "rock, paper scissors,"thing going on. Someone who played Marth well could be beaten by someone who plays Fox well, someone who played Falco well could beat someone who played Fox well, someone who played Sheik well could beat someone who played Falco well, and so on. Characters countered one another without countering the
entire character list. I played Samus and I found that the matchup against Marth, Sheik, Falcon, and Peach were harder than most others. This isn't true for Falco or Jigglypuff. Almost everyone was the same way.
In Brawl, as it appears now, there is a specific lacking in character balance. A character on the current "tier list," cannot beat someone higher than them. Even if you are better than the other person, you are not likely to beat my Pit with Sonic, Mario, Toon Link, or anyone except those who are better. Then, when you get into that field, I feel like I don't stand a chance! I cannot beat a Meta 1 v 1, I just can't do it. The match-up is so bad for Pit, that I might as well call it quits if they choose him. That's it. I've beaten many foxes, even the ones on my and higher levels. It can be done, but if someone is slightly lower or on my level, let alone better then me, in Brawl with a better character... nice try.
There are serious balance issues in Brawl compared to melee. Yes, Fox was good, but he was still stoppable by several characters. Not true for Snake in Brawl.
(Evidence as sited by tournaments ranging from Brawls release to today and videos on youtube and other places)
Combos:(Where are they?)
In melee, there was a fair amount of what we call, hitstun. Hitstun is the time where you cannot break your tumble animation and can only DI. When you get hit, you could smash DI to set your path and then regular DI the rest of the time. So, when you got hit, you could use DI to work your way out, DI tech in order to quickly escape, or you may mess up and DI yourself into more of the combo. So, the proper use of DI could hurt or hinder you, and it was hard to figure out where you needed to DI on some attacks because of the direction they sent you OR the subsequent move that
might follow.
On the giving end, you needed to keep hitting the person. By adding a hit you, of course, add more hitstun. By keeping the person trapped in the stun of your moves, you could keep racking up damage or keep them off the stage. This is key for many people. In order to do that though, it was helpful to use some of the games own engine against itself as well as things programmed in. One of these is L-canceling. Just before you hit the ground, you could tap the shield button to remove half the lag of the move you are doing so that you could get back to move again. Simple, efficient.
One of the most popular exploits of the game was Wavedashing. The game gave physics to each character. All of them had there own fall speed, friction, and weight. Some characters were floaty, sticky, and heavy while others were fast, slippery, and light. Each character was very unique, even the "clones," as they are called. So, by air dodging into the ground, you could slide across the ground from a standing position and could do any attack from there. Very good move. By combining things like L-canceling and wavedashing, it allowed a lot of characters to speed up attacks so that they could effectively combo. Through use of proper DI, you could escape them, but you
had to learn how to do it right.
In Brawl, however, there are very little techniques you can use to increase your mobility and, therefore, combo-ability. Most characters don't stand a chance at doing any more than three hits in a row, even with the person breaking out of their hitstun. The only way to continuously hit someone is to have them DI right back to you every time. You can even air dodge out of your hitstun now, making it even harder to land a hit on anyone, usually leading to your own punishment for attempting. The lack of mobility, slowness, and low hitstun in this game makes it near impossible to do any kind of combo, ever. The only semblance to a combo that you can get is a chain grab, which there seems to be way too much of in this game. Impossible to break out of, and incredibly easy to pull off. That's not a good mechanic.
Speed:(evidentially important for exciting games...)
As everyone can tell, Melee is a much faster game. Just the movement speed of the characters alone is enough to show that. Then, on top of that, there are those physics engine exploits that increase the speed and agility of many characters. By allowing people to advance quickly and react fast makes the game not only interesting to watch, but amazing to play. The fast characters had an obvious advantage over the others, but, at least, the exploits allowed slower or mid-speed characters to keep up with the faster ones, even if the faster ones used the exploits too. Going as fast as you could was a great mind-game, a way to keep yourself on your toes, and, in general, was good for dodging.
Obviously, Brawl is much slower. They reduced the speed of character movement and it shows. Games take longer now, just because of that. On top of the general movement speed lowered, there are practically no tactics that you can employ to make your character go faster. There may be a few impractical ones (Like wingdashing, or using the crawl animation quickly), but nothing notable. This means that slow characters are slow, and that's the final word. There is now way to reduce your lag, so your slow moves are slow. You cannot change that in Brawl.
Items: (still suck)
Just like in melee, items are either overpowered, or worthless. The only difference in Brawl is the inclusion of Final Smashes. This was a cool and captivating idea at first, but, after seeing the application, it is horribly unbalanced. Certain characters have utterly worthless finals while others are instant win buttons. While it may not matter in competitive play, it still irks me.
Infinites: (dividing by zero is NOT fun, trust me)
In melee, the only real infinite combo was Wobbling, discovered and implemented by Wobbles, by timing the ice climbers grab attack and tilts in proper rhythm to achieve an infinite stun lock with damage. That's it. There was the freeze glitch, black hole, and other things, but Wobbling was the only tournament legal one.
In Brawl, they somehow managed to include a variety of infinite moves all over the place. Dedede chain grabbing is probably the most popular. All you need to do is down throw and grab again. There's the grab/release move on Ness and Lucas with a few characters. You can stun lock someone with Diddy's Bananas. And the list goes on. If you play on the wrong levels, you will find yourself overpowered by some moves faster than you can wish you had wavedashing to move away. It's a problem that is going to cripple a lot of characters and will alienate those slow characters even further.
Marth: (six years of development and he's still broken)
I hate him, still.
Samus: (Intergalactic bounty hunter and hero)
Severely nerfed and has problems killing anything now. Great >_>
New: (It's shiny and new and everyone loves it)
Brawl is currently the more popular game. It's nearly impossible to find a melee tournament anywhere, especially one that's not running Brawl mainly or in the background. While there are a lot of people who still want to play melee, (even before the wave of new people yelled at us, "Shut up and go back to melee then.") no tournament holder seems interested in running one because there aren't enough people locally who support it. I'm organizing one myself, but am catching a bit of anger from people in my area for not running Brawl. It's not fair to people who don't recognize Brawl as their game.
Its also new that there aren't a lot of things that we can call "advanced." There really isn't a way to separate pros from scrubs anymore. The only people you are assured to beat are absolutely new to the game, after they learn who a good character is, you can beat anyone who isn't playing a better character than you. It's very limiting and it may be due in part to the lack of experience by anyone. It may get better, but I highly doubt it based off of what I've seen so far.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hopefully that's everything I can think of, but I doubt it. I'm hungry, so I'm going to go get something to eat and come back. if I think more things, someone responds to this, or w/e, then I'll post more.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tl;dr
In melee, the better person wins; this is not true in Brawl.