Where oh where did I say that Melee has no depth, If I recall correctly, I implied that Brawl lacked the depth of skill because of it lacked these pivotal skills. However, brawl as it stands and will most likely stand is actually balanced. My brother (who does have competitive knowledge as believe it or not, there are actually tournaments outside of your little world of MLG"Pro" such as Otakon tournaments and the like.") would have loved to been able to play his original Smash character (Pikachu) in Melee but was basically FORCED to play Marth to compete. Now in Brawl he can play Ike or Pit or any character he feels like playing. Play in a real competition like Magic: the Gathering back in the days of early Onslaught-Mirrodin without playing affinity. That = Lose. Now jump forward into Pre-Lorwyn Standard (TSP and RAV) You could play, Sadin Aggro, Rakdos Aggro, Blink, Aussie Storm, Tarmorack, and much MUCH more. which of those days were better for Wizards of the Coast? Easy, Pre-Lorwyn. A rule of thumb to all you elitists, Diversity makes everything better.
BTW: In GGXX, you could perform combos, but there was a little meter that diminished the power of combos, proving the point that the games design was not pro-combo.
Another so called proclaimation of brawl's depth.
One name, Isai...
you can't say this or that about skills between melee and brawl because 64 had isai dominating as first. 64 has nothing in terms of tech skill compared to melee, and isai was still dominant (proving that there is a level of skill few to none could attain, now that's deep). In the conversion to melee, he only dropped to second (rank is the overall career ranking). Brawl is more similar to 64 than melee, does that mean that ken is better at 64 than isai if ken plays 64, NO!!! They are two different games which skill can't be compared between. And if 64 and brawl are more similar, does that garantee that Isai will be number one in brawl? No. Once again, two different games, don't compare the two on skill level... A master chess player doesn't beat a master checkers player at checkers. Tell the number one checkers player that checkers is nooby friendly, train for a month and then challenge him to a thousand dollar money match, you'll loose, point ended...
You are correct about other tornaments besides MLG, but the questions remains, "how good is the competition there, if MLG is has the top players?" How can you call yourself a champ, or even good if you do well at every tournament except for the ones with the good players in them? Yeah, you can do good at otacon, but how well would you do at chillin's by weeklies? Real competitors want to challenge the best, if you just want to simply beat people, perhaps you aren't a competitor, maybe you're just a bully. As for your brother and marth, sorry, you make no valid point for one reason: pikachu was the marth of 64, he had disjointed hit boxes, over powered smashes and numerous 0 to death combos. He wasn't forced to change his main because his main was top teir, point ended... For balance, every game is balanced in the beggining, (especially when we get a game close to the same time as japan) but later on those nasty teirs show up and get rid of everyone's joyous, "I can play anybody parade" If you don't believe me, look at the gannon and falcon forums, they already know that their character's aren't the best, but when the tourney results say that they gets no wins, only the faithful will be playing the loosing game, while others who want to win will do like your brother and play brawl's marth (talking about melee) whichever character it may become. Diversity may make things better, but in fighting game tourney's as well as most other tournament's, people want to optimize their chance of winning. It could be as simple as buying a top quality racket in tennis, to modding a gamecube controller, to simply picking a character they know is statistically better than their opponent's. Better equipment ='s better results, and that counts toward's characters. As for magic, this is a fighting game forum, just why? If you really want to bring up the fact that I used chess to make a point about strategy, I'll put it like this for your example: they change the rules and legal parts about the game monthly. (Once brawl get a standard ruleset, they won't change again) Heck, half of the game is illegal (talk about variety), and you can't buy character select booster packs in brawl, so your point on variety is invalid. Fighting games don't change once they hit and variety depends on how much you are willing to gamble on your victory odds...
Guilty gear is notoriously known as the combo game. It one of the few games where dropping the combo mean loosing the match almost indefinately. In every version of the game, pro's took no more than two combos to kill you. Before roman canceling, you could combo instant kills. After, roman cancels made super moves ineffcient, leaving the game to become combo heavy. False Roman Cancels further the combo meta game by making it cheaper to combo. As of now, the low teir characters are characters who basically die after one combo or need three to win. GG GGX GGXX and ect, were all combo based. The guard gauge isn't there to hamper combos as you believe (it does lower damage, but smart or more difficult combos don't really affect that meter) it is there to punish turtler's who rely on blocking. Say it isn't pro combo based on dustloop forums and see if you don't get flamed bad...