I didn't want a rehash of Melee either, I wanted a new game. There's plenty of ways that Brawl could have (and has) been made into a much better game. There's a difference between changing the gameplay and making it worse than the previous titles. Sakurai's planning for Brawl was self-defeating. He tried to take a game that was already liked by casuals and competitive alike and removed the competitive players out of the picture. He tried to take a genre that by its nature was competitive and seeked to make it uncompetitive.
As a result, he ended up creating a game whose problems could only be overlooked by those who weren't big fans of the series, this is a big issue. Those who wanted to play Smash consistently and expected a level of improvement simply wouldn't have it in this game. Allowing players to grow more skilled with experience is a big part in both satisfaction and replayability, Sakurai unfortunately didn't realize that this was the most important feature in replay value.
This is not true, Brawl Minus is in fact a CASUAL pandering mod that makes the game more like Sakurai's intentions and less like its execution. It's one of the few mods that is widely accepted as being superior to the original game (even by Melee players). Despite its casual pandering, the game has far more depth than the original game, and is widely considered to even be better in casual play.
A fighting game at its core is meant to be competitive. It is ideally meant to be a challenge where the more skilled player wins, the only thing Smash did differently was allowed luck to play a factor. The fact that Sakurai tried to deviate from these core concepts is precisely why Brawl is such a terrible game.
Brawl Minus focused on things that would take people's mind off of the competition (and the seriousness of it) rather than basing the whole game around avoiding it. It's perfectly possible to allow a game to be competitive, have a skilled player win, and not get so worked up over it.
Brawl Minus' unpredictability is in the control of the players, and it always is in the favour of the players, meaning when a new player does witness something unexpected they aren't frustrated by it, while techniques such as prat falling (tripping) are the bad kind of random factors that frustrate players because the game decided to take away their victory in a way that many would consider undeserved.
Also Brawl Minus has both balanced characters and balanced mechanics, the game is much more enjoyable when you need to rely on your variety of defensive techniques rather than use them as a crutch. In Brawl Minus, players who do well are likely to feel a greater sense of satisfaction when they manage to succeed. Everytime they avoid an attack they can feel satisfied knowing that they've dodged something dangerous, and everytime a player succeeds in attacking their opponent they feel a sense of pride and a sense of encouragement to continue attacking for a combo. This leads to greater satisfaction.
In Brawl's case it does everything it can to try and punish players, which in turn leads to players becoming frustrated and wanting to leave the game. This is most prominent with the poor character balance, tripping, and the lack of hitstun.
Everytime a player is punished in a video game, he or she must have an understanding of why he or she has been punished. In Brawl there is no such reasoning, tripping can happen at any moment, you can get hurt by trying to attack, and you can get utterly dominated even when you're using all of your character options effectively.