Man this thread is huge... I guess I'll throw down. You guys aren't thinking with your heads at all! And you're playing too much Marth!
Brawl is strongly competitive, you guys just are doing it wrong. One thing that Brawl has that Melee did not is character and style diversity. In Melee, characters had generally archetypal moves, and all moves had set knockbacks and trajectories based on percentage, and due to wavedashing and fast dash speed, horizontal hit moves were useful at low percents to combo into a grab, which with almost every character was pretty devastating, and juggles on heavy or fastfalling characters were ridiculous as well. Recoveries were easily interruptible, with the exception of forward-diagonal high priority up-Bs, like Mario and Marth, the teleports of the Pokemon and the floating back forever of Peach and Jiggly and Samus. The idea is to combo and edgeguard, combo and edgeguard repeatedly.
Brawl right now is in a development stage where we are learning about the strength of the diversity of the cast. Snake is all about stage control and damage building over time. Diddy is about being quick and using bananas and pokes to trick your opponent and build damage. ROB forces you to play aggressive. Lucas is a strong anti-projectile counter with good in-close combos and mixups, while DeDeDe is a versatile fatty with a neat projectile and plenty of strong moves and plenty of fast moves, and he can trap people into getting hit with powerful attacks, or getting gimped. Falco is a shut-down character with his spike and chaingrab game and powerful spacing tools. Who is the best character? They're all a piece of the puzzle.
I think you're breaking down the game too much and ignoring important aspects that are going to shape it: Glide Tossing setups, Chain-grabbing, counter-camping, catch and release, and spiking setups. This game is NOT played with just Marth and MetaKnight, this game isn't played just in close or at a distance, and this game isn't just about shield countering. As much as I respect Cactuar, I don't think he has every angle of this game covered; and didn't you do all that stuff the same in Melee anyways?
Now, to address the argument that this game isn't competitive because of the lack of ability to dominate. First of all, several characters do dominate people that don't intimately know the counters; Snake, Metaknight and Falco in particular. Instant metagame; now DeDeDe, ROB, and DK are good because they can more easily deal! And Lucas is an OK third! (lol) Lets see where it goes before we judge. You guys are expecting so much from brawl in so little time.