Just ban Meta Knight already.
The boards are the community, and the community speaks for itself. Why take a vote? We all know what everyone else believes. It doesn't matter what the facts are, people have already made up their minds. You can see it with the overwhelming amount of threads and posts everywhere you go. Even in the Meta Knight boards, nothing is productive anymore. It's a constant war of debates on the for or against of Meta Knight. It is quite obvious that the opinions of people are not about to change, and for the majority of the SBR members, I do not see a significant difference of opinion arising. If it's a vote you're going for, Meta Knight is already banned. People are too closed minded to look at it any other way.
This is the PROBLEM. The community is definitely close minded and ban happy (in not just smash bros but most games). Of course, the issue is that most things you are going to want to ban aren't actually ban worthy, and you very, very seriously undermine a game when you ban a character. Banning is truly radical and drastic; a lot of people don't seem to understand the severity of what they propose. Frankly, I think we are better off in the long run just ignoring this sort of mob mentality.
I, in the interest of full disclosure, don't see a ban as justified at all, but let's analyze the situation in the abstract.
The first step has to be defining what is ban-worthy. Sirlin is a good place to start here:
http://www.sirlin.net/ptw/intermediates-guide/what-should-be-banned/
Okay, a character is enforceable and discrete (beyond the niche case of selecting "Random" as your character) so we only have to worry about whether it is warranted. Sirlin suggests this as a vague benchmark:
The only reasonable case to ban something because it is “too good” is when that tactic completely dominates the entire game, to the exclusion of other tactics.
That's... really vague. Sirlin's primary example of ban-worthy (Akuma) is obviously more extreme than Meta Knight (or any character in any smash game). Here's where we have to actually start; what is the minimum value a character can have and still be ban-worthy? Let's start big and work down:
Use this character or lose no matter what. - Obviously ban worthy.
Use this character or lose unless you are significantly more talented than your foe.
Use this character or a very small number of other characters or lose to this character.
Use this character or a very small number of other characters or lose to this character unless you are significantly more talented than your foe.
This character is beatable by a large number of characters, but objectively there's no reason to pick any character other than this character.
This character is the best character in the game clearly but is one of many plausible choices.
This character is only disputably the best character in the game. - Obviously not ban worthy.
Right now where is Meta Knight? Do we even all agree? I see him at the lowest level personally, but I notice that most people here see him on the second or third lowest level. A few see him as high as the second highest level. Tournament results are suggesting that, in the current metagame (which is obviously not mature), Meta Knight is behaving like the third lowest point. I really don't think we should be calling that ban-worthy since you're really just punishing a game for having a clear best at the top instead of rock-paper-scissors. Ban worthy in my view is between the 3rd and 4th points on the list in a mature metagame and only applies to the top point in an immature one, but this is where we have to start.
Also, about procedure for banning, do NOT make the mistakes of the Pokemon community. Really, the process was designed in such a way to highly favor banning things without favoring reasoned opinions or objective evidence. First of all, an objective barrier to begin discussion has to be set. By that I mean that if the tournament results don't show a level of dominance N, Meta Knight is automatically not banned regardless of what anyone thinks. I would secondly propose that a supermajority (2/3) would have to be required for a ban in any voting procedure; smogon's procedure had the big flaw that a 51-49 vote would actually ban something when obviously anything that closely divided should not be banned. Lastly, you have to ensure that every vote that counts is well reasoned and free of undue bias. I'm not joking when I express that the main reason Wobbuffet was banned at smogon was because most players find games involving it not fun (whether it is ban-worthy for other reasons could be debated, but it's not really disputable that this was the motivation behind most votes to ban it). Just assuming top players or SBR members or whatever are going to be fair is pretty dangerous, but there's a lot of time to mull over problems related to this.
Two last comments as some people don't realize some basic things.
1. Banning Meta Knight "for a while" is an obvious joke. It's way easier to ban something than to unban it, and realistically, he would be banned forever if he's ever banned. If you don't realize this is severe and extremely radical with very deep consequences, you really have no place being involved in a discussion of it.
2. Soft bans are not an option. Sorry Japan, but not doing everything you can do to win within the rules is classic scrub behavior. If we are going to ban anthing, it HAS to be a hard ban.