BPC, I'm going to answer all your questions one by one, since I'm guilty of basing my arguments off of comparisons to other fighting games.
Name me one other fighting game with such a diverse metagame?
The diversity of the metagame has nothing to do with it. All fighting games work with the same principles: Spacing, use of attacks and defenses, mindgames, comboes, etc.
Where the way the game works induces that a character bad against a lot of the best characters can do stunningly well against other top chars?
I can't find the video at the moment, but a Sakura player beat a well-known Ryu player in Street Fighter IV at EVO. Sakura is terrible.
Where there are chaingrabs that are finite? Where your survival is based not only on how well you block but what you do after a potentially killing blow lands? Where you don't die if you go past a certain amount of damage (you could potentially go up to 999% with a few chars, like Falco, Fox, DDD, etc.)?
Lumping these three together because they all ask essentially the same thing. Yes, comboes that are dependant on percentages, edgeguarding and the existance of blast zones separate smash from traditional fighters, but the essential principles that I've already outlined are still there, making this game, in essence, a fighter.
Where there are, innately, so many factors that need to be banned from the base up such as items and broken stages?
We've already removed those, so... who cares?
It really is the case that you can pretty much compare SSBB to Mario Kart about as well as you can to Street Fighter. Both are equally stupid comparisons.
COME ON! BLUE FALCON! [The Blue Falcon just happens to make a cameo in Mario Kart Wii]
In essence, Mario Kart is a racing game, so you can compare the features of Mario Kart that are intrinsic to racing games to other racers. As an essential fighter, we can compare features of Brawl to that of other fighting games.
And guess what? The relationship between characters and the value of matchups, essentially the center of the Metaknight debate, is found in all fighters. So yes, we can compare Metaknight's so-called 'dominance' to the top-tier characters of other fighting games.
looks like MK is officially banned in Ontario
****ing way too many babies in this community, smash community are never going to be taken seriously >.>
Because every game had apparently devolved into MK dittos or something so people lost interest and stopped attending tournaments.
Good for the kids in Ontario. They couldn't handle putting in the effort to beat Metaknight in tournaments, so they got him banned. Congratulations. Now lets wait till they start crying when they start going to other regions that know that Metaknight is not broken and they start losing a lot because their scrubby* play is clearly outclassed by the play of every other region that has learned to beat Metaknight.
*I'm using scrubby in the actual definition of the word here, the one used by Sirlin. For once, it's the appropriate term to use in this statement.