The ballot was a general ballot, the only ones who thought otherwise were the idiots saying "uwu u r wasting ur vote on characters with ingame roles uwu".
Uh, I’m pretty confident it was for Smash 4 DLC.
And could you really blame them? There was no guarantee that an AT/Stage Hazard/whatever would be promoted.
It probably didnt happen because it didnt fit the vision of what Sakurai wanted to get into smash. There was probably a lot of garbage already being thrown into the ballot even with the limitations.
Still, sometimes the best quality of stuff comes when we put limitations. There are many works out there that became better when the creators received limitations. There are also many works that became garbage the moment the creator was given free reign. I dont see how the ballot would have improved if we allowed people to vote for the mascot of a cereal. If anything, the amount of people voting for something for the "lulz" would have increased. And dont tell me that it wouldnt be the case because this is the internet and we have examples of what too much freedom does to people with places like 4chan.
I meant limitations as in the characters who weren’t deconfirmed at the time as being the remaining choices, why on earth would I encourage people to vote for
literally any character when I was referring to video game characters?
Of course this is the internet, there’s always gonna idiots wasting their votes on Spongebob, Homer, Naruto or whoever but it’s clear that those aren’t counted whatsoever.
If Sakurai/Nintendo actually told people they could vote for any Nintendo/3rd Party character regardless of game role back then, there wouldn’t be a need for another Ballot.