Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24114180-20140107193454/@comment-1061930-20140203033316

Individual skill doesn't negate the existence of character tiers. Daigo can dominate all day with Ryu, but that doesn't mean Ryu is anywhere near as good as Cammy, Fei Long, or Akuma. If anything, Smash's tiers are even more solidly set in stone than a lot of other fighting games--the gap in viability between Kirby and Fox is dramatically greater than, say, the gap between Fei Long and Dan.

Sure, low-tier characters can beat high-tier characters, but that's highly dependent on large skill discrepancies between the players and a lack of matchup knowledge. Those things aren't what makes a character good.