its a bit wild how smogon players prefer old gens being frozen though. The whole rby tradebacks ban feels silly, if you can do it you should do it etc, even if its not the game you used to play or something. I dont remember this being a common thought process for other competitive games, but I could just have a limited view LOL
I used to see this semi-frequently in classic fighting games. In the late '90s, Capcom would occasionally put out an updated version of one of their titles in the arcades, but the community would sometimes stick with an older version of it for one reason or another anyway. Like, the Street Fighter Alpha 3 playerbase largely stayed on the original CPS2 release even though the Naomi re-release added a ton of then-console-exclusive characters to it and fixed a bunch of infinite combos. Alpha 2 was also largely preferred over Alpha 2 Gold for reasons that I've entirely forgotten at this point. The Street Fighter III community also stayed on CPS3 instead of migrating to the later Naomi release. There were a lot of little reasons for this. Sometimes some of the specific changes were arguably a step back for one reason or another, but I think chief among them was that the updated versions of these games weren't as widely available worldwide as they were in Japan, so people largely just preferred to stick with what they were familiar with and what they had already invested practice time into.
That sort of mindset isn't so common in the genre today, but it's still heavily embedded into Smash Bros. The Smash Ultimate devs actually put in a decent amount of work into making the Stamina mode viable (e.g. some fixes to what had previously been fundamentally broken combo set-ups in a format that didn't use the standard percentage-based scaling knockback), as well as adding a traditional super meter mechanic into the game as an alternative to the standard Final Smash mechanic so that all of the ultimate attacks could still be utilized in some manner even when items were disabled. The game even heavily features both of these things in its various single-player modes, as if the devs wanted to make sure that the players at least tried them out. Does the competitive Smash community utilize either of them at all, even in smaller alternative-rules side brackets? Nope. They just play Smash with largely the same house rules they always have, with only the slightest tweaks from one game release to the next. (Disclaimer: I haven't been involved with Smash tournaments since 2020 and don't care to investigate whether any of this has changed since then.)
People just get set in their ways, and after enough time of being set in their ways, it takes a
lot of inertia to get them to budge. To tie this back into unpopular opinions about Pokemon, this is the sort of stuff that got me to abandon Smogon OU for VGC back in Gen 4. Like around the time that Garchomp got put into Ubers, I sat back and thought about the game at a macro scale a little bit and came to the conclusion that some of the most significant gripes that the community had with the game's balance were at least partially a result of the rules that the community itself imposed onto the game. To give a simple example, Outrage and Stealth Rock were extremely powerful and centralizing in Singles... but they kind of sucked in Doubles. So, at least a few of the reasons that contributed to why Garchomp was so polarizing in OU (Outrage OP, Stealth Rock resistance) weren't factors at all in the "official" ruleset. So that gets the gears turning in my head, and I figure that: to any extent that Game Freak is putting any care into competitive decisions
at all, that care is going into Doubles, so I'm just going to move on with my life and play Doubles rather than deal with any of these arguments about Singles.
I'm a pretty strong believer in the idea of "playing the game that you have, not the game that you
wished you had." And if I don't like the game that I have, then I'd just rather move onto another game altogether than try to "fix" the current one myself, because the latter process just comes with a whole bunch of community politics and baggage that I loathe to interact with. Tons of agenda-setting for what "should" be part of the game, who gets to decide that, and how best to mask your personal taste as "objectivity." I don't want to play Debate Club. I want to play video games.
(This is not a value judgement on your favorite metagame. Especially you RBY heads. I think it's great that anyone out there is trying to keep classic scenes alive at all, especially when their default state is such a hilarious patchwork that barely functions out of the box. You guys do you.)
