Except your entire claim in this topic is based on an opinion lol.
From what I can gather, you're saying we should've banned Melee's AT's like wavedashing and L-cancelling since the Brawl community was praised for banning MK. Problem is, banning those two different things is a completely separate challenge.
There are three, and only three, criteria for a ban: A ban must be enforceable, discrete, and warranted. This is a fact. There are no other criteria for determining if something should or should not be banned. If you think this is not a fact, please feel free to share what else you think could possibly fall under these criteria.
For enforcable, you must be able to ban something and be able to prevent a player from using/doing that thing, and punish those who do. Let's say we did ban wavedashing and L-cancelling and I'm at a tournament with that banned. Let's say I'm playing Fox and I'm about to land with an aerial, but I want to shield as soon as I get to the ground. What if I press the L button too soon, and "accidentally" L-cancel my landed aerial? Should I be punished? Do I have to forefit a stock? What if nobody notices that I L-cancelled it? What if my aerial ends one frame before I land, I press the L button and wind up wave-dashing on "accident"? Should this be punishable? What if I airdodge an attack, but land on a platform at the end of the airdodge for a "mini"-wavedash? Should that be punished? If something is to be banned from tournament play, it must be reasonably easy to identify when it happens or to prevent it from ever happening at all. How could we possibly enforce not letting players use wave-dashing/L-cancelling? I'm curious to see what argument you could possibly come up with for enforcing a ban on Melee's AT's. With banning Meta Knight, that's easy to enforce; you're just never allowed to pick the character. Easy peasy. It's a completely different type of ban which makes neither of them even slightly comparable. This, alone, makes banning Melee's AT's completely and utterly impossible, but we'll continue onto the next two topics for the sake of argument.
For discrete, it must be "completely defined". Again, for banning Meta Knight, this was easy. "This character cannot be used". Done. With banning wavedashing/L-cancelling, it's a lot harder to explicitly define what counts. Let's say wave-dashing at a 45 degree angle is banned. Well then, what's stopping players from wavedashing at a 40 degree angle (or whatever the next angle they can direct themselves)? When you try and ban something that has so much variety, it quickly becomes a metagame of using that which doesn't break the rule, or the "second-best" tactic. The Brawl community actually tried to do this while keeping Meta Knight legal by adding rules like the Ledge Grab Limit, where you can only grab the ledge 35 times, and the no-scrooging rule, where you can't go from one ledge to the other, under the stage, without touching the stage. This led to playeres using the "second-best" tactic of only grabbing the ledge 34 times, or going under the stage but landing on the Smashville platform instead of grabbing the ledge. It's a slippery slope, to say the least.
For warranted, it's simple: it has to be warranted in the first place. The tactic needs to be so overpowered that banning it will make the game ten times better. Thing is, 99% of players will agree that banning it does NOT make the game better. A small bug that gives a player a small advantage does not warrant a ban. Do you think Melee is somehow "unique" in the fact that it has bugs that give players a small advantage? You don't need to even look outside of Smash to see bugs being used to the players advantage: just see Brawl, with DACUSing and Glide Tossing and chain grabs and jab locks and light-stepping and dozens of other things. Should we ban all of those too? What about the
Valle CC in Street Fighter Alpha 2, should Valle have been punished for using the Valle CC before anyone even knew what it was? If it looks like such an OP tactic, why did the match go to last game last hit? Because the tactic isn't "unbeatable", the opponent can use it himself, and the metagame didn't suddenly start revolving around the Valle CC. Banning Meta Knight, however, was warranted, to some degree. The metagame almost entirely revolves around him, and banning him results in a more character-diverse metagame, which many players consider better.
Your mind seems to be wrapped around this concept about how you think Melee revolves %100 around using wavedashing and L-cancelling, where the game is so so SO much more deeper than that (and this is coming from someone who hates Melee). Players have to adapt, they have to read their opponent, they have to master their tech skill, they have to know exactly what they can and cannot do in any situation in the game based on the physical rules of the game world. They shouldn't have to worry about some external punishment for "accidentally" wavedashing or something silly like that.
