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This might end up being a really stupid question, but the answer is not immediately obvious to me.
There are a lot of complaints that brawl, and to a somewhat lesser extent, smash 4, are really slow paced games.
But the smash games have always had a fast mode (not sure if this is in the 3ds version, but looks like its in wii u). So why isn't this mode used? Why isn't it a thing at tournaments? Is there something that just makes it unworkable?
The game was designed to run at 60fps, which it does admirably. The faster modes just increase the speed of the game beyond 60fps. Of course, it cannot draw frames faster than 60 times per second, so what you end up with is a stuttering mess that doesn't actually change the gameplay or strategy at all fundamentally.
When people complain about the speed in smash games they are not talking about literally everything in the game. When people say they want the game to be faster they usually mean just movement speed and recovery time on attacks/landing. People usually don't want faster rolls, dodges, shield drops, shield stun, and stuff like that. Speeding up everything kind of just puts us back where we were but in a janky stuttering form like cosmo said.
Certain aspects of the game that are toggleable are expected to be toggled for "competition". Including items, and stage choices. This magically excludes things like damage ratio, and other adjustable factors, for literally no reason except "That's not something that we should change, Sakurai made 1.0 what it is so that's what we use."
That said, lightning-Smash and slo-mo Smash are at major extremes, and neither is really a desirable speed for any fighting game.
Smash 4 doesn't have Special Smash so you can't really do it there and putting it in brawl doesn't ensure more exciting gameplay. If anything, it's just gonna be like Brawl in the sense that there's a lack of combos and everything people love about Melee, but sped up. It'll most likely end up like a trainwreck. Saves time for time's sake, but doesn't add anything special gameplaywise.
Changing the game speed does not change what strategies work, not really at least. For example in Brawl, defensive play is still going to be the best regardless of whether or not you adjust the speed.
Certain aspects of the game that are toggleable are expected to be toggled for "competition". Including items, and stage choices. This magically excludes things like damage ratio, and other adjustable factors, for literally no reason except "That's not something that we should change, Sakurai made 1.0 what it is so that's what we use."
That said, lightning-Smash and slo-mo Smash are at major extremes, and neither is really a desirable speed for any fighting game.
The first issue with changing the damage ratio is that it's a game-wide change which won't have uniform effects. Suddenly things that didn't combo will (e.g. Jabs to Smash attacks), moves that were fairly harmless offstage might become deadly semispikes, and combos that used to work might not any more and shield pressure strings that used to allow rolling out in between the hits might become shield breaks. You pretty much have to re-examine the whole game every time you change that number, and the choice of number is subjective - why should we play at a ratio of 1.7 instead of 1.8?
The second issue is that every game mode uses 1.0 by default, and some don't allow changing the damage ratio. Changing that number means new players to the scene get the rug pulled out from under their feet and invalidates a lot of the experience they've accumulated playing the game alone or casually.
The third issue is that I'll bet any thing the game was playtested on 1.0 so even if there's no a priori reason to prefer one ratio over another, you get the highest probability of ending up with a balanced game at that ratio.
Those are mostly the same reasons equipment won't catch on competitively, plus the fact that it's random and grindy.
From an accessibility standpoint, there is an argument to be made that a wider audience would be able to participate in the game the closer it's played to default settings.
For example, let's say default setting is the game out of the box as you get it with the starter characters, stages, two minute timer, items on standard.
We allow the unlockable characters because more characters is more depth, at least in most cases. We can start splitting hairs on the tier list, but for now let's just assume that more content leads to more depth without specific regard to the viability of specific characters with the exception being if the game devolves into the usage of one strictly dominant strategy on the character select screen.
We also allow more stages because again, most stages adds more depth. We disallow certain stages from competitive play because of a variety of factors that remove the result of the game from the context of player vs. player or reduce the game down to a strictly dominant strategy/conditionally dominant strategies. There are many ways this is determined with varying TO's/Regions having various normative or utilitarian methods of determining the stages.
By in large, items are removed from competitive play because of the spawn randomization factor as well as the strictly dominant strategy some items present. For example, certain pokeballs / assist trophies / final smashes are powerful enough to make the game simply about farming for items, regardless of the other unique options each character has thereby detracting from the depth of the game. This strictly dominant strategy being at the whim of a random generator also proves troubling.
The reason we use stocks as opposed to timer, for the most part, is because stock provides us with a clear winner / loser (outside of the super rare instance two players lose their last stock on the same frame). Tacking on the timer makes things less clear in determining a winner or loser, so most rulessets add on a clause that at the end of time, with the person with a lower percent being the winner if the game goes to sudden death. Ironically, the timer/stock clause has received a fair bit of controversy as of late with calls to shorten stock counts, despite it being one of the smaller alterations to the way the game "feels" in comparison to "out of the box" default play. Most of the debate is legitimized because the choice of stock tends to be subjective at some inherent level, since the differentiation between stocks does not see a similar benefit as compared to going from time mode to stock mode play. There are obvious pros/cons to shorter vs. long stocks, with preference most likely dictated on whether one values expediency/balance or consistency of results.
ALL THAT BEING SAID -
While I'm sure Fast Mode Brawl has a wonderful game theory depth (MJG and I would know since we've spent many hours playing MK/Marth Dittos in what KS affectionately calls Speed Brawl), playing that as the "competitive" setting would create an additional barrier for a new player that starts off by playing say, the two minute timer mode, items standard, all stages on.
Similar to the stock change debate, the change doesn't necessarily add inherent depth in terms of the game (to my knowledge), so all it serves to do is add an inherent level of inaccessability, making the change simply arbitrary. There should not be arbitrary rules as a maxim, unless the point of the event is to run an arbitrary rule (ie Speed Brawl Side Event )
Changing speed won't give us back wavedashing, it'll just make the game more unplayable and therefore, worse. Smash 4 is actually good though so I'm not complaining about its pace.
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