I'm not even making any specific references with the point. Sakurai said it though, with his mountain metaphor. The higher the peak, the more narrow the base. That isn't true, and a good game designer should be able to manage to create a game with simplicity, but with depth. And perhaps he did manage that despite his own beliefs, but it doesn't change what he said or how he feels.
I'm not sure what Metal B's point was if he wasn't saying that a more simple game can't or doesn't have the depth of a more complicated one and, as a result, doesn't appeal to people who want something more competitive. You don't have to have a higher skill floor to have a higher skill ceiling.
We still go around the same problem over and over. Brawl was a mess, everybody agrees even Sakruai. But where is the problem with SSB4? The game is simple with a lot of deep. The actually argue, that many changes made for Brawl, was because of mixing up the feel of the game and balance it. Yes, they failed hard with it, but try to correct it with SSB4. But it wasn't to simply dump down the game.
The overall point of me is, that if you want to design a game with a real competitive goal, you design it differently and you will also target a much more narrow audience. That's why your Chess point is actually a point for my case. Check is a simple and deep game, but also one of the most popular one in human culture. This is because, it actually attracts a wide audience of casual and hardcore games trough history. I don't see any rule heavy or overlay complex game stand the test of time. So you want to target the middle ground, which is what Sakruai tries to archive.
But with that out of the way, I've never really understood the justification for the changes from Melee to Brawl onward. Listening to interviews, it's clear that Sakurai is not interested in making a game tailored to the competitive fighting scene. And that's fine. I get it. That's great. But I don't really understand why changes were necessary in the first place. Smash 64 was a surprise hit and Melee went on to be the best selling game on the GameCube. And while Brawl was obviously successful on the Wii, it's not like it came anywhere near Kart/New Super Mario/Wii Sports sales that can explain why a deviation from the Melee formula were necessary to target the expanded audience compared to the success the previous installments were already enjoying.
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Melee wasn't regarded as this overly complicated game. Plenty of people played and enjoyed the title for years playing four player free for alls with items on and never had a clue that things like wavedashing and l-cancelling existed and didn't give a shit about what was being discussed on Smash Boards. Melee was already a great party game. The fact that a small subset of the community became insanely skilled at the game and developed a scene that would be completely alien and uninviting to casual fans that just wanted to throw pokeballs around and hit each other with hammers doesn't diminish at all its appeal as a casual party game. It was fine in that capacity.
So where I stand is that I certainly don't think Sakurai should be booted to the curb -- this has been a labor of love for him for almost two decades now and I think he's got a lot of great ideas and the games are better for it. However -- though I don't think you hire someone from the Project M team as the lead and assume it'll lead to a fantastic Smash 5 -- I do honestly believe that taking on someone from the competitive community to consult on the core fighting engine would benefit the series. And I say that because I just don't see why it's not possible to make a game that appeals to both the casual and the competitive communities simultaneously seeing as how 64 and Melee already did that. The changes made from Brawl onward strike me largely as solutions to problems that didn't exist.
You not understanding the whole picture is actually a problem. You see, people always praise Melee, but all the expert of the scene know, it is actually a broken mess. Is just happens to be broken in a way, that some specif rules, characters and glitches make the game competitive and lot of fun. But overall the game gets dominated through some mechanics, that only helps two handful of characters to have all the fun.
One of the expert is Sakruai himself, who pretty much noticed the brokenness of the game like everybody else and also mentioned it in one infamous interview. So he needed to change the game to more balance it out. Brawl of course was his first try and it didn't work out. Like at all and there are many good reasons for it. SSB4 now is his second try and it actually looks like he managed to produce out a much more balance game. Much more balance then Melee.
The next big subject matter is appealing to all audiences. If you already working on rebalance the game, you also look into getting a wight audiences. One of the goals of Smash was also to make a Fighting Game into a high selling franchise. Which wasn't the case besides a few game-series at the time of SSB64. That's what people always forgetting, if they talk about Melee. People not only play Smash, because it is a fun game, they also play it for the Nintendo characters. And if you want to startup a series and sell its predecessor, you better not make the audience stop liking your game.
So we start to get into the problem of making a game to comparative. There will always only be a very narrow audience for overly complex games. If you sell people a game, which you advertise as simple to learn and start making it more complex, you will lose the casual audience.
That's pretty much, what happened to Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Before Street Fighter 4 the fighting game genre was almost dead and only lived through it comparative scene. You would never guessed that in the middle of the 90s, where people loved the genre to dead. At the height of its popularly the games were also very accessible. But then the developers failed to adapted to the new console market and the death of the Arcade triggered its downfall. Many fighting games just didn't work on consoles the same way. They lost there accessible! I would argue mainly because of the controllers, which didn't fit the gameplay, and the games getting a little too complicated and similar (how many times were the same Morrigan Sprities used in different fighting games?
Oh yeah, seven times! ).
On the other Smash is still the best selling fighting games series to date. Sakruai archives this to a simple tactic: Get as many people like the game as long as possible. This means creating an appealing product, have comparative gameplay and accessible for different audiences. You don't wanna scare them away by getting too complicated and lose accessible; getting bored through to dull gameplay; or angry by having a imbalance game and no way of catching up to better players. In this way they will be willing to buy the sequel. I would say, that there could be a even better middle ground between all the goals aka even more complex and still different, better Online-Experience or a deeper Single-Player-Mode, but sadly the game needs to released at some time.
In my opinion is this the reason, why creating a competitive focused Smash-game would have no future. Nintendo would lose an audience, which in return would mean, that the series needed to scale down and properly has a harder time to recover (look at Street Fighter 4). Smash only works as an complete product. Many failed Smash Clones show, that you need all the pieces to become as successful as the series.
then.