I gave a quick read to your article and I must admit that this is indeed one of the best reads I have had in a good while on these boards. After reading the other pages of posts I might be restating something in here but I still feel it is worth saying.
I believe that higher tier characters and the people who main them are inherently flawed, except at the highest levels of play. I believe that because higher tier characters have such better tools at their disposal, they begin to rely on the moves and superior moveset of the character. Taking the example from the initial post about MK having a 3 frame ftilt. MK's ftilt is indeed an amazing move. It has caused me a great deal of pain on the few times that I was (un)fortunate enough to play an MK main. Now, I will not say that a player with such a good move will always spam it (why would you with that ****able tornado?) but a player will tend to use it over other moves like MK's fsmash for the purposes of damaging or punishing. This same player has to work relatively less to land a move like MK's ftilt compared to a player trying to land D3's fsmash if you face an equally good MK vs a D3.
Now what does this have to do with anything?
Assuming in this example that the players are of equal skill, according to all the "on paper" people, MK will always win the matchup. Better tools at his disposal, better recovery, much faster, higher priority, etc. etc. According to the "in match" people, two people of equal skill in this matchup would lead to either a stalemate (timer ticks to 0) or a very close matchup because in reality games are all about baiting and punishing, not just spamming 'nado until the other player dies.
What I believe is that some people pingeonhole themselves by playing one character and one character only, especially when that character is high tier. I say this because the worse the character is, the more the user has to overcome obstacles to become good with that character. With myself as an example (I play GDorf). One night I meet a falcon main. We talk, it is obvious he knows falco's matchups pretty well. Has knowledge of what to do, what not to do. When we evetually play, it is no items and he picks FD because he knows projectile user + GDawg on flat stage = win. He eventually ragethrows his controller after I land a 9 link long choke chain and finish by fsmashing a predicted roll behind me.
We had comparable knowledge and comparable experience, so what was the deciding factor between us? Playing as a character with few tools at his disposal (gdorf) against a character who has a good number of tools at his disposal with a player who relied on them over mindgames.
I was better than him because of the fact that my character forced me to learn better.
This is where the purely "on paper" and "in match" people both suffer. On paper people will know the matchup perfectly, and will be slow and unresponsive while trying to pull off something they saw in a combo video. "In match" people usually have such a high learning curve because they will get murdered by everyone until they shape up. However, it is worth noting that once they get to higher levels of play, they do indeed have the advantage if their mindgames are comperable to their opponents'.
/wall of text