For a native Japanese speaker, his English writing is surprisingly fluent / grammatically correct...
Then again, most of the people in my GF's Japanese Language Exchange program have VASTLY superior reading / writing skills in comparison to their speaking skills.
Either way, I'm going to give a LEGITIMATE response to the OP, in case anyone ELSE wanting to get into Smash reads it.
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Most fighting games, especially current gen fighting games, are made by developers that have at least a fleeting knowledge that their games will be played by serious gamers in serious venues for serious cash; this leads them to carefully craft their games so that concepts espoused by the competitive gaming communities (balance, fairness, and competitiveness) are upheld in the final product.
Smash is a very different series.
The original Smash was a misshapen series of broken maneuvers that ended up "balancing" itself out in much the same way MvC2 balances itself out; everyone viable had amazing 0%-to-death combos, so it was (apparently) fair enough to work. When Melee was being developed, the designers had never intended it to be a competitive fighter in the same vein of Street Fighter, and so they took no care to craft discreet balance into the game. Melee was salvaged thanks to the physics oversight known as "wavedashing", which allowed for feints and odd approaches, ultimately increasing the depth of options for player interaction. Unfortunately, players of the Smash series fell into a problematic (and peculiar) pitfall; since Smash was never INTENDED to be a competitive fighter, players felt justified in making small "modifications" to fix perceived problems that the developers never cared to fix.
This is the beginning of the Smash community's long line of bans.
According to traditional competitive gaming values, such as the values of the Street Fighter community from which you hail, it is customary to ban NOTHING until it is shown to be, ultimately, totally gamebreaking; banning for preference is unheard of. Unfortunately, Smash's unorthodox background and development procedures gave its early players a weak sort of justification for banning things based on preference: namely, "developers would have banned this if they had ever INTENDED for Smash to be competitive". Of course, coming from a background such as yours, this is patently ridiculous; regardless of where the game CAME from or WHY it was made, competitive games follow competitive conventions, one of the most sacred of which is "ban nothing until it kills the game".
Due to having this weak justification of "developers (mis)intent", however, the Smash community has taken it in their hands to do what they perceive that Sakurai should have done himself. Previous games were, in all fairness, light on bans. Melee's biggest ban was the Item Ban (removing all items from the game), but the scope and magnitude of the ban set the stage for a larger scope of what could or could not be touched in the future.
As of now, I'm saddened to say that many of the bans in traditional competitive Brawl are uninformed and unjustified bans. Items were banned from day one without serious competitive testing, preemptively and with impunity. Stages are regularly banned with LESS THAN HALF of the total votes of all members of the Brawl Back Room, a group of elite players that forms our largest governmental body. Tactics, such as infinites, are either restricted or outright banned at many tournaments for "fairness". All of these, and more, are banned with the justification that "any serious fighting game developer would have done it already", lacking, of course, the restraint or the gravitas of a more contemporary fighting game community, such as yours.
Smash has a long history with attempting to force this game into a competitive mold it was not designed for. Different communities may have taken different roads along the way to the same goal, but out community has decided that banning (sometimes without proof, many times without a majority, always with the best of intentions) is the optimal path. As such, all items, one of each characters moves (Final Smashes), many techniques, and up to half of the total number of stages, has been banned.
I hope this mini-history has shed some light on why we, as a community, ban things.
