Mindgames alone don't make a good smasher. You need both technical skill and the ability to out-think your opponent in order to win. At lower levels of play, perhaps dominating one end of the spectrum will get you somewhere, but you must have balance between the two to get anywhere.
You guys say that "you can have all the tech skill in the world but without mindgames it's useless." Well, what about being the smartest guy ever who knows exactly what his opponent will do, but has none of the skills to back it up. More or less, that guy is equally as screwed.
In high levels of play, if you can predict and punish your opponent by reading his movements, you are likely to do well. But technical mistakes are just as punishable and are just as deadly. So what if I know that every time I drill kick to shine with Fox you're going to try and shield-grab the d-air and I hit you with shine and wavedash into up smash? If I miss the L-cancel, my planning and mindgaming ability in that situation is virtually null.
On top of that, it's hard to know what you are capable of and what you are not capable of without a clear cut understanding of your own technical skill. If you know what to do but can't do it, what is that worth? If you try to do something that WOULD have worked but you screwed up, what's the point? I finally managed to win several games against an opponent who I had long considered to be better than me (he probably still is), but the reasons I won are as follows: First, I was able to figure out his course of action and respond to it. Second, I figured out how I could force him to what I wanted him to do, or at least to do something I could handle. Third? My technical game was spot on. And all that effort was nearly wasted because instead of shining him with Fox I forward+b'ed off the stage in a muscle spasm of worthlessness. Despite my general ability to discern what an opponent will do, until recently I have been killed by better players because of the mistakes I made. Solidifying my tech game (and believe me, I still have a ways to go) has made me a significantly larger threat.
Vir, "higher skills" are nothing without the foundation to back them up. Even if you can find a way to learn the former before achieving the latter, you will always be limited. You said it yourself, algebra seems really simple when you know calculus. But how did you ever stand a chance of learning Calculus without knowing Algebra? And how could you learn Algebra without learning arithmatic, and how could you learn to add and subtract without being able to count? Perhaps you forget how necessary all that is having reached a higher peak, but you are nothing without your basics. But as we also know, you can only get so far with basics.
We put a lot of emphasis on mind games over technical skill because when you see two high level smashers compete and one destroys the other, that's mostly "mind gaming it." But player 1 wouldn't have to out think his opponent consistently in order to destroy him if the other guy kept missing his l-cancels, right? Mind-games push you over the top into higher realms of play, but you don't reach the level beneath them without having a nearly flawless tech game. It may be easier to develop a tech game, but that doesn't make it less important.
Again... balance, balance, balance, balance, balance....
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