It makes me wonder why Nintendo is still trying to appeal to this newer gaming generation by making games more "approachable" in gameplay, when they wouldn't notice the difference between Super Mario World and NSMBWii in terms of gameplay at all.
Like to me, appealing to the established playerbase is a matter of excellent gameplay, because that is the design mentality those players grew up exposed to, while appealing to the more proletariat crowd is a mere matter of a shiny graphics and the appeal of NEW STUFF.
Now, I'm not about to start questioning your age, and I don't mean for this to seem directed at just you (since you share this opinion with many people around here) but have you not seen, oh, every game Nintendo has ever made? Nintendo IS the approachable casual gaming company. They make the same games, over, and over, and over, and over, and over. and people love them for it. Because they're Nintendo, and that's how they make a metric ****load of money. They made a game based around hardcore mechanics and pattern recognition once. It was called the Lost Levels and it came out 25 years ago, and not even in America because it was too hard.
I understand that by "established playerbase" you mean the small percentile that competitive gamers make up. Twenty years ago, video games were not in every household, they were a new technology that was damned expensive. And they were basic. So basic.
So when you say that games were built around stellar gameplay and not just flash, I'm confused as to what you mean. When? Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers, these were very basic games with no established predecessors and no real depth. Those WERE amazing graphics, and the marketing budget was bigger than then it ever has been since. Nintendo was producing tv shows, magazines, toys, new ideas for controllers (powerglove anyone?) and consoles, with every cent in their bank going towards making video games accessible and fun, and something people wanted to play together. You curse the people that invented gaming culture for "keeping on" and not innovating their game mechanics?
Oh right, mechanics, those things they arent designing enough of. Where did those come in? The nerdy types in their parents basements and poorly lit arcades dumping in hours and hours and quarters and quarters, trying to beat a simple game, better. Donkey Kong is now heralded for its exact and unforgiving mechanics, to be good at it meant memorization of patterns down to the pixel and minuscule fractions of a second. Mario Brothers, exact jump timings and queues took serious nerds serious hours to refine. These games had absolutely no mechanics in mind other than "jump over or on top of, x/y" and it took the countless hours spent by a pile of nerds to achieve a high score.
[as a quick aside, i'll take this moment to remind people that wavedashing is literally breaking the game mechanics, and took what, 5 years to become commonplace? now its one of the first things "hardcore smashers" teach each other and take for granted as if it was just always part of the game's core mechanics. just appreciate that]
Brawl, Sakurai adds in a number of features to make the game less competitive [read; abusive hardcore nerds] and something that is more accessible and fun for a broader audience. Nintendo's... oh what's the word I'm looking for... Spirit? Essence? Core Values, we'll go with that. What happened? even more people played it than Melee, and the hardcore nerds vomited with rage and kept wavedashing around their parents basement screaming japanese voodoo curses on everyone that had a hand in the ****** of their beloved Melee.
Brawl now too, is starting to see new techs and developing its metagame slowly (not having a rather large portion of the franchise's fanbase is crippling the game's competitive scene as such) and it's not the game designers who build a perfect and intuitive fight engine, its the millions of people putting in hundreds and thousands of millions of hours that make a game evolve from being a juvenile pile of nintendo's extra 3d models to having a competitive scene at all.
If you want a fighting game that is built around seamless mechanics and staying true to its fanbase's ideals, play Street Fighter, play MvC, play KoF, play BlazBlue, play any number of the games that have refined their mechanics for 20 years to be the most fundamentally competitive games. How many casual smash brothers players are there? 99% of them. How many casual street fighter players are there? 7? It is designed to be competitive, and meticulous.
If you want Brawl or Melee to be something other than a casual gamer's romp into the world of fighting games, based on the rules and mechanics of a fighter developed by its most dedicated nerds, I suggest you shake your head because you don't watch Mickey Mouse and wonder why there isnt more gunfire and ****.