Wow, EoFF too? I'm beyond sick of people raving about Melee's epicness and awesome competitive scene and how it's the best Smash Bros. game. I get enough of that looking at the SSB4 boards on GameFAQs trying to look for news and updates on the game.

...well Ultima Shadow, at least you're not being too extreme on the Brawl hating side of it at least (glares at GameFAQs), and I'm glad to see NeoCracker praising Brawl rather than saying it's the worst Smash Bros. game (and kudos to you for saying it's the best, rather than calling it the worst because it's not as competitive).

Also Bolivar, the group that complains about Brawl are a vocal minority (emphasis on the vocal), and it's still considered to be one of the greatest Wii games by many people. It sold 10 million copies worldwide (~3 million more than Melee).

Anyways, what really bothers me about the Melee praise is how much people overlook just how flawed and glitched the game is, and how much they complain about Brawl for fixing the glitches and exploits. I mean, people actually expected wavedashing to return? The sad part is that people are so attached to Melee that they've hacked Brawl to resemble Melee from the character menu select, all the glitches and exploits including wavedashing, making ledge grabbing harder (and no longer possible to do when facing the opposite direction of the ledge), and even getting rid of Falco and Ganondorf's changes that were implemented to declone them. These people are way too obsessed with Melee and hardly gave Brawl a fair chance. Worst of all is that they think SSB4 is magically going to fix all the "problems" Brawl had. Sakurai said himself that he'd never make another Smash Bros. game that required as much reflexes and focus as Melee (which I'm glad of, since Melee was pretty much the odd one out because it was so fast and characters fell like rocks) and I'm highly doubtful he'd bring back wavedashing and L-cancelling. Sakurai said the above in a Nintendo Everything article.

I'll pull off some things I said to MTKO about why I think the Brawl hate is unjustified:
Smash Bros. was never meant to be a competitive fighter, and to hate on Brawl because it isn't competitive and it's too simplified is quite unfair. Given elements like all stages having hazards in the original 64 versions (yeah, Dreamland's wind wasn't too bad, but that doesn't make it a completely neutral stage), items always showing up in most single player modes with no option to turn them off, and random factors in attacks like Luigi's Green Missile and Mr. Game & Watch's Judge, it shows that the randomness in Smash Bros is supposed to be a defining feature of the games.

Also, Smash Bros was always supposed to be a simple and easy fighting game for everyone to be able to learn easily, hence why all regular moves are done with one button rather than having two kick and punch buttons and special moves are done from one button rather than having inputs like down forward punch or back forward kick. I know what you're talking about with the changes made in Brawl, especially the highly reduced hitstun making combos harder to do. But in a game series where most people will be doing free for alls and not one on ones, reduced hitstun is pretty much necessary to make sure that someone doesn't get constantly juggled and comboed by other players, and that they have a fair chance of getting out of combos.

Sure, the gameplay of Brawl may have deteriorated to you, but many of those changes were implemented to give everyone a more balanced playing field, rather than favouring the highly skilled ones while leaving the less skilled in the dust. People can play Smash Bros. competitively if they want, but they should really keep in mind that it wasn't designed for that kind of play in the first place. That's why I find all the Brawl hate annoying, since many people hate it for not being as competitive when Smash Bros. wasn't meant to be competitive in the first place.
Also, Melee was ridiculously glitched. Many of the "advanced techniques" were nothing more than glitches and exploits: wavedashing, shine combos, L-Cancelling, yet people complain that Brawl removed them and call it "less competitive." And then there were the characters (Dr. Mario, Ganondorf, Falco, Young Link, Pichu, and Roy, and they practically share all move animations with their originals.) and stages (Battlefield, Yoshi's Story, Dream Land, Yoshi's Island 64, and Fountain of Dreams all use the 1 giant platform and 3 smaller platform layout) that were just riddled with clones. The AI in Melee is just sad: characters doing nothing but jabs, Ganondorf doing nothing but Dark Dive 80% of the time, Luigi never using the Super Jump Punch to recover.

As for the balance, of course every game will be unbalanced in the competitive scene, but Melee is the worst balanced in casual and single player. At least Brawl Ganondorf and 64 Samus could do proficiently in Classic Mode on harder difficulties. Melee Bowser, Kirby, and Pichu? You get slaughtered and you can barely do any damage without taking a heavy beating first. Also, practically every casual player knows in Melee that Pichu and Kirby are ridiculously weak. But not many casual people that play Brawl or 64 would tell you that Ganondorf or Samus is weak.

I guess I'll try to wrap it up. I'm not saying that Melee is a bad game (though I'm tempted to after seeing all the nostalgia-driven savage Melee fanboys on GameFAQs and other sites), but people should really stop worshipping it and saying Brawl is a bad game just because it isn't Melee. Complaints about Brawl from Melee fanboys are just ridiculous (even ranging from "Brawl even did the menu layouts worse than Melee" and "Melee's Adventure Mode was better" when it was just a poorly veiled attempted at making a second Classic mode and calling it an "All New Adventure Mode"). I know I'm being harsh towards Melee (though compared to how harsh Melee fanboys are towards Brawl, I'm practically being a Melee fanboy myself), but people should really stop praising Melee and bashing Brawl as if it was the sole existance of their life.