There's a reason Blake Force brings up Brawl Minus, and it greatly has to do with the characters. They were edited and re-designed with "near-brokenness" in mind, but another way to put it is to make as many abilities on a character exciting, unique and and worth using as possible. The design philosophy revolved greatly around "If everyone is broken, nobody is".
The result is a roster full of characters players want to mess with just to see what crazy stuff there is AND more viable options so that no character ends up left behind, unable to catch up, or far outpacing anyone else. It's a solid mixture of depth and fun. Most importantly though, the characters are really the life-blood of the game. The player experiences the game through the players. However many or few modes there are, the game can only become better when the player's provided many options.
Brawl falters here in a big way by failing to address proper character viability. We have overbearing characters like Meta Knight and characters with inexplicable odd advantages such as Snake's HUGE hitboxes. We do have some generally fun and solid characters like Diddy and Olimar and Lucario. And then we have characters like Ganondorf who has to work sooo hard to just to keep pace with other characters.
I understand the idea is to just have fun, but the lack of attention-to-detail towards characters and their options is more of a hindrance to fun than anything. If your preferred character is solid all around or has overwhelmingly good options, lucky you. Unfortunately for the other people, the game ultimately becomes biased towards players with the better characters. Sakurai wanted results to falter, but the characters are the life-blood of the game, and unless the game plays itself for the player (and it almost does at times...), the players will still retain control over their destiny. If the player decides to seek anything other than "pure mindless fun", of which the game clearly isn't designed for, they may end up relying on faulty options.
HURGH... that's a lot. But what I'm getting at is that Brawl could have been a LOT better for both sides of the fan base simply by concentrating on making sure every character had enough viable options. Results would be less predictable this way.