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I see the same trends in Smogon that I see in competitive Smash Bros. The nerds playing the game are becoming increasingly divorced from the game that everyone else is playing (in Smash's case, casuals and scene oldtimers, in Pokemon's case, there's thankfully another more official comp format in VGC) with every new arbitrary rule change and addition. Around 10 years ago, the active Smash series games were Brawl and Melee, and the former had to make concessions in its ruleset for a metagame dominated by Meta Knight and all the things he could do to invalidate other characters and stages, but the players were still of a mind that everything that they could conceivably preserve within their ruleset without introducing overtly centralising or random elements, they would. On the side of Melee, the stagelist was already pruned heavily from days past, but Melee itself was in a rut of a smaller group of old players deciding how they wanted the game to be played; the game would see a resurgence later. Now, ten years later most Brawl players have moved two games over to Ultimate, and tournament rulesets are in a stranglehold despite an universal perception that character balance is at an all-time high despite a gargantuan roster and many 'degenerate strats' have been heavily discouraged on a mechanical level by the developers themselves. But stages are only limited to a select few, first of all because that's what players got used to during Smash 4, and second, because people are afraid of change to what they now perceive (completely arbitrarily) as the definitive way to play.
