Hrrm; I wouldn't quite call it derailing, though I didn't like the approach used. Basically the premise is that an actual Snake guide can't exist feasibly at the moment since Snake's not a very linear character compared to other characters like Roy. There are many Snake metas, and it doesn't feel right to officially sanction one and stuff the gameplay styles of everyone else, as much as I'd like others to play more like myself. Making one guide for each meta is too hard and would cause unnecessary overlap. With that being said, the best we can do at the moment is modularize and give everyone the tools to develop/choose their own playstyle, for example, by making a movelist guide (
http://smashboards.com/threads/in-depth-movepool-analysis.384346/) or discussing properties of certain good moves (
http://smashboards.com/threads/easy-combos.361878/#post-18178018).
Unfortunately, for people who don't navigate the Snake boards frequently/don't have the motivation to, these things can be difficult to find, which is presumably why we don't have many Snakes who know what they're doing [anymore. A lot of the 3.0 meta's been invalidated, actually. To cite some examples: from debug mode we now know that dair 3-hit on a grounded opponent combos into any moderately fast move, including itself, meaning that getting the 4th hit in actually limits your options. On the other hand, back in 3.0, the last hit of down air, airborne or not, was the most valuable; I think discussion about it was in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guSqJ-G3lo8. Back in 3.0 IIRC lots of people also dismissed down-air as an ok-ish move; even though it was nerfed, it's now considered one of Snake's staple combo tools in 3.5. Snake gameplay was also highly cypher-centric back then; I decided not to (read: couldn't) get into that habit, which is fortunate, though I still see people cypher as a defensive tool despite the fact that Snake arguably has better options in several situations now]. If we can get all of the information compiled into a single place for easy reference and have some sort of overseer to do this, that would be great for Snakes in general. More Snakes (hopefully) means more meta, so Snake would develop faster as a character too.
Compiling all of the information is tedious, though, and for the people who know the current general meta (note the word general here: there's no unified meta and everyone has different playstyles, but, for example, I know Cisyphus/Prof's general gameplan despite the fact that I'm not a fan of certain parts of either myself) well enough it's completely unnecessary. It follows that there's a free rider problem of sorts: people decently ahead in terms of meta have no reason to compile the meta into a unified guide since they have their own beliefs on how to play Snake but would like the benefits of having more Snake players to contribute, while people who don't know how to play Snake already have their hands full trying to understand Snake in the first place.
Usually the solution to a free rider problem is to "subsidize" it, which I believe is being done for some interpretation of subsidize. Compiling character information is tedious and takes several hours, and personally I only do it on a need-to-know basis, but Cisyphus has made several charts about kill percents, opposing character properties, and as you mentioned, dthrows. Similarly, if someone pokes hard enough at a topic (like ftilt in the aforementioned link), I usually give most of my relevant info on the matter before they figure out everything on their own to save them time, since they've already put in the effort, and if I find anything definitely useful but completely underrated I usually post it after figuring out how it works decently well (E.G. IGTing and the Sheik matchup before I ended up removing it due to concerns of potential nerfs and degenerate gameplay; hopefully nobody brings up the latter again).
Maybe subsidizing was a bad word. Probably info socialism or something like that, though I still prefer the concept of compensation of people for their efforts.
In any case, everyone who's contributing here's putting out what they're best suited for. For example, my memory's terrible and would have limited use for a whole chart on kill percents, and my own morals back from when I was a scrub still hold so I dislike chaingrabbing people with dthrows. Instead I prefer to focus more on abusing properties of certain moves to figure out what to do in-game, while cisyphus might have different priorities and still hasn't integrated IGTing into his gameplay. Of particular note, neither of us have any direct use for making a forum compilation guide at the moment: I'm sure that if the forum were already littered with bits of info when we came in, one of us would be motivated to do it, but at the moment, our time would probably be better spent elsewhere.
Long story short and to put it bluntly/rudely, the moral of the story was probably "Get busy or get out".
free grabs 4 days