The Ness being cut thing was hilarious because the wording of the Lucas reveal strongly implied Ness's return but people interpreted it backwards and then acted like Sakurai lied to them when we found out about Ness. I remember I thought Brawl's roster was incredibly impressive, but of course, there was blowback as there always is. The thing is that the speculation scene often constructs wild fantasies that usually have like 10 more characters than the game will really have and then is really upset when those fantasies are, in fact, fantasies.
I also kinda like the revisionist history that believes tripping was a big deal in Brawl. The joke I always liked in Brawl's heyday was that if you tripped you always got hit by Ike's fsmash instantly even if Ike wasn't in the match because that was the consequence of tripping if you listened to people online. Actually playing competitive Brawl, tripping pretty much didn't matter. It was only a 1% rate, and if you weren't dumb, you only actually started up dashes at times you got a real advantage for doing so (so you didn't do things like dash around in place). Strong players also did things like always c-stick fsmashes so you don't have a trip rate on them and learned the ICs infinite variations with no trip chances (this was a really big deal since ICs infinites were quite significant to the overall Brawl meta). This meant you saw any trips at all less often than once per tournament set (not game, set: less often than that). Most of the time if you did trip, you just lost a small amount of momentum and didn't even get hit for it since the dynamics of the Brawl meta meant most dash start-ups were done not within striking distance of an opponent, and if you did get hit, it was usually nothing worse than like a nair or a dash attack. In years of that game, I think I saw literally one game ever decided by a trip and it had an impact worth even noticing in maybe up to 5 more. It was such a trivial mechanic, but it sure attracted an incredible amount of attention from people who really didn't play the game...