Hey man, I agree with you wholeheartedly. The problem is that most of the community sees otherwise. In my opinion, if you learn to handle these stages properly, they become fun, the same way you learn to enjoy (or at least tolerate) matchups that suck (e.g. playing against Jigglypuff or Falco).
The community's trend is a scrubby one, and it always has been. Players decide they don't like something, so they ban it. Some of them will be explicit and just ban things because they are disliked (an obvious slippery slope), but others will explain why they dislike it and ban it for reasons other than brokenness. Such is the way of the scrub.
"It's unfair that I have to learn the timing of Rainbow Cruise in order to fight there."
Don't get me wrong. Some things are broken and worth banning. Some, in fact, are very obviously worth banning (Hyrule, for example). But most of the bans are just "I don't like that stage."
I always had more fun CPing stages like Poke Floats and Rainbow Cruise, not because "OMG moving screen, awesomez" but because other people constantly whined about it, and it amused me. And in my admittedly limited experience, I never felt like PF or RC gave me a huge advantage. I seemed to perform about the same on that stage as I did on some of the "neutrals." Granted I'm not a top 1% player, but most of us aren't.
I think the logic people have used in this thread for removing stages is highly suspect. I didn't read the entire thing but from the first 10 or so pages (out of 63 atm) I basically saw two arguments for banning them.
1)
Stage X has random elements that can be a determining factor in matchups, and this is BAD. I'll agree for the sake of argument that randomness is bad. Well, why don't we go ahead and ban FoD, YS, and DL? Invariably the response is something like "We don't want to end up with 1 or 2 stages" which is suspect because if 1 or 2 stages is bad, why is 6 stages not bad? Do people not realize the cutoff is arbitrary? Or it's something like "The randomness on these stages is not as bad as on banned stage X, so they shouldn't be banned." While this may be true, the argument is suspect because people are appealing to a standard of randomness that has never been presented. What is the randomness threshold that is acceptable? Without some kind of standards for the amount of acceptable randomness, any decisions will be arbitrary.
2)
Stage X gives character Y too much of an advantage. The problem with this argument should be self-evident, but evidently it's not, so I'll elaborate. What exactly is "too much of an advantage"? It's never defined. It also presupposes that there is a Correct Matchup Chart. For instance (I'm making these numbers up, their values are really not the point) Fox v. Marth is 50/50 and any stage that makes it worse than 60/40 should be banned. And the judgment that 65/35 is unacceptable is based on a conception of fairness that already presupposes which stages (and hence which matchup percentages) are acceptable, which is completely circular. Fox is the best character in the game, and players can deal with this by playing other top tier characters or Fox, playing even better with lower ranked characters, or by changing the rules in order to make the game more "fair." This last option is a classic scrub mentality, and it seems to be what the MBR has embraced.
If there were a hypothetical stage called Perfectland with no jankyness, platforms at just the right levels, sides just so wide, depth and height just right, all in such a way that on average, the stage did not benefit any particular character, then the mentality that has been applied here would dictate, "Ban every other stage and just play on Perfectland, that way the best player can always win, and no character has an advantage." And even though SSBM doesn't have a Perfectland, there seem to be quite a few players who want Battlefield to be the only stage available, and if present trends continue, I'm sure it eventually will be. It won't stop people from complaining about the wonky edges, though, and dreaming of Perfectland.
