@Zombo Considering you didn't wanna bother with everything I said, you sure are putting a lot of effort into it. Neat.

But to start things off, who the hell ever said that Smash 4 is crippled? I sure didn't, so that assumption is all yours. Now, for the rest of your "argumentation":

The Story: Maybe it wasn't important to you, but it basically made the game. It provided a narrative and reason to the existence of Master Hand, the figure theme, and how all these characters appear in the same universe without any referential knowledge of their own universe (Shulk never reacts to Metal Face, Ganondorf never gets killed by Link, Mario actually fights Peach head-on, and many more things that normally make no sense at all). And as the series progressed, more elements got added to this narrative - until Tabuu kinda raised questions. Nonetheless, the narrative was thrown out of the window to remove a boundary - that's comparable to burning history books to spread fanfiction.

Also, what is it with people like you constantly excusing Nintendo's unwillingness to put effort into their stories for certain games? They've already shown that they can do this, but I keep hearing this idiotic "Nintendo isn't about story" bull. Does Nintendo have some kind of "who needs story" free pass? It's completely irrelevant who it is, throwing a story away out of convenience is lazy as hell.

Also, you don't seem to play fighting games other than Smash at all, because almost every other fighting game has a story, sometimes even extremely complex ones that give freaking world-spanning RPG's a run for their money, and nobody says "kill the story" - they appreciate and discuss this effort, because it gives the characters, well, character.

Smash Run: Have YOU played it? I won Smash Run multiple times without pressing a single button (except to progress menus), because the AI is unable to actually use modified stats properly, instead suiciding by overshooting, or just being the regular kind of incompetent, anyway. The same applies to Smash Tour - a friend even uses it for cheap farming. Start a Smash Tour with 3 AI opponents, go buy groceries, and when he's back, it's already over, sometimes with him as the winner. The huge RNG factor eliminates any skill requirements, turning it into a full-on lottery.

1. Wrong. Many tracks are straight originals from their respective franchises. See through the music list, and you'll notice it's quite a lot. A good number of remixes was also taken from Brawl.

2. What kind of backlash? People were extremely divisive about Subspace Emissary. Also, it's pretty narrow-minded of you to think Nintendo couldn't do it better this time around. There's always room for improvement, and this game had more than enough potential to improve and expand the story immensely. Instead we got one of the cheapest cop-outs I've ever heard from any Nintendo person ("People were uploading most of the story to YouTube and spoilered stuff to people who willingly clicked onto the videos, so we decided to drop it for the next game", as Sakurai put it).

3. That makes it only even less justifiable to have clones at all. If the roster is already large, why even bother with clones in the first place? No matter how you view it, clones are lazy, period.