I am almost certain Smash bros's competitive, online players is a tiny sliver of its user base. The rest doesn't care much where their favourite characters are in the current meta.

For casual to average players, almost any character is viable. Only at high level do a few characters dominate the whole game.

Nobody would want to get into a game that requires hundreds of hours of homework before they can finally start to become good at the game.

This is a huge issue I have with a lot of established online games. A lot of the advice is just "watch this video, follow this guide, use this meta build or we're not going to play with you." I play games to have fun learning mechanics, experimenting with builds, and organically exploring the world. I may eventually use guides to get caught up, but the game has to be fun at its core before then. At least in smash, you're the only one who has to worry about your performance.