Akuma is broken in HD remix too, his unblockable setups are simply too good.
SF4... if anyone's broken it's my main (sagat).
I really think I this, "ban for the average Joe" needs to be addressed.
Two major issues come of that, firstly, what is the average Joe? The fundamental problem that comes when defining for the average level of play is, there simply is no basis for saying what the average level of play IS. So all that we're left with is arbitrarily deciding "this is the average level of play". So, we talking about the people who lose to din's fire spam consistently? The IC player that only know how to chaingrab and spam grab? The players that the former actually get a grab off. What is the "average joe"?
Second issue is the continuously advancing skill of the average player. Compare the average skill of a competitive player in the early Ken vs. Isai days vs. now. Even marth players like me are silent wolf equivalents compared to what it was back then. If we banned based on what's a problem for the average Joe now, how do we know that as a community we won't advance past it in a year or so?
That's why banning for any particular level of players is a bad idea, because those levels are hard to define and constantly shifting. Instead, we the top of the metagame is a much more useful basis since it uses concrete technical criteria. Not everyone can be the best in the game, but with enough practice everyone can learn how to say, cape teleport. Or waveshine. It's the technical stuff that defines what the MU actually is, and if it's managable with enough tech skill then lrn2play is a legitimate thing to say.
If it's a 90-10 MU at the top of the metagame... well that's a different story.
But either way, it's not talking about pros or average Joes, cause let's face it, most pros aren't at the top of the metagame (I see pro ICs drop chaingrabs all the time), it's talking about what the MU is if both players have their tech skill down.
I'll give you one concession here: "respect" in the strictest sense of the word, probably isn't what most people are clamoring for (although I'd like to know why SRK is that bad... because they wanted to have some items on? Sure, they should have been more respectful, but it's not like we were saints, either). Still, though, why latch onto their policies so much? Even you would be hard pressed to say that a big reason people argue that we can't ban MK is because that's "just not what a competitive community does", but who decided that? I certainly didn't. No one, including you, IIRC, has ever explained why we have to wait until the absolute breaking point to ban something (something we don't even do consistently, btw), instead of being big boys and girls and deciding when to ban something ourselves.
I'm saying that people are saying a strict adherence to established fighting game dogma (only ban when things are ABSOLUTELY necessary) is cited as a reason not to ban Meta, but within about a week-month of Brawl even being released, items were banned and people were already deciding not to play on certain stages, a bias that migrated to the SBR's decision making process. If we can't ban Meta, then we should reinstate all items and stages until tournaments prove they are broken (which never happened). One or the other; you can't say that we have to strictly wait until Meta kills the game and forces everyone away before we can ban him, but then say that we can ban items or stages just by wanting to.
Items are a matter of tournament settings, aka standardization for the simple fact that turning them on is as much banning itemless play as turning them off bans items play, you've gotta pick one at some point.
The neutral stages are the same, though I'd with the idea that a lot of counterpicks got banned prematurely. The thing is a number of them justifiably overcentralized, and for quite a few it was based on factors that we had previously observed and were unchanged (ex. circle camping).
