Quote Originally Posted by Zevox View Post
That I don't think is true at all. The kind of imbalance that tends to get talked about on a competitive level usually has limited to no impact on casual-level play, because the imbalances reveal themselves only in the hands of players who know those characters and what they can do very well and have practiced it a lot. A casual player picking up Fox in Melee, MetaKnight in Brawl, or Bayonetta in Smash 4 won't be at any meaningful advantage over other casual players, because they won't know what the things are that make them so good in competitive settings, and thus won't be able to take advantage of them. You need something like deliberately-imbalanced boss characters for something like that, and Smash has never had one of those.

For that actual effect, you can just use the handicap mechanic that most Smash games have instead.
While casuals don't experience competitive imbalances in characters, they absolutely experience casual imbalances in characters. And those imbalances are both more organic to the group experience and more easily 'tuned' than the handicap system. The latter is not without its merits, but its resolution is really low - it's only appropriate for addressing massive skill imbalances.