You would be surprised. I was apart of the smash community for a long time. I can attribute part of this to people being very attached to characters and like what's been mentioned with the way the game was created (catering to "casuals") much of the tier listings would change over time due to new bugs or people just trying to push the limit for certain characters.
We can see artifacts of this with the combo videos competitive players would put out.
While I agree competition and the metagame was the real objective (like in CCGs for example) people did like looking in the crevices for that next thing that could give their character that extra wave dash or what have you. I dare say that's what made smash so much fun.
Could you explain what is meant by the "meta-game"? The author explained a little, but I'm still not clear and have never played myself. Was there an actual game-within-a-game? Or was there just a style of play where everyone agreed to eliminate all outside assets and play with only each character's native powers?
The metagame (or "the meta") is the long-term game in which the moves are "I am going to play this character/deck and practice/use these strategies" -- decisions you make at the beginning, or before, play starts in the base game and the rounds are complete games of the base game.
Learning new information about the base game (or it being updated by the developers) changes what moves are best in the metagame — but as this knowledge propagates through the player base, the probability distribution of what-you-will-be-facing changes, which also changes the best choices of meta-moves.
For an example of why metagames are more than just knowledge about the base game, suppose that we have a fighting game with character A (or a CCG with a player-designed deck A) who is well-rounded and B who doesn't do so well in most cases but is good at beating A. Then even if the base game doesn't change at all and nobody learns a new trick, B is a good choice if and only if lots of other people are playing A — meaning you have a dynamical system.
A lively metagame keeps things interesting because players keep doing new (or dusting off old) things to defeat the current things, rather than sticking to what works — because "what works" changes. It avoids the problem of "X is best, so either you ignore other parts of the game or you are deliberately playing suboptimally".
We can see artifacts of this with the combo videos competitive players would put out.
While I agree competition and the metagame was the real objective (like in CCGs for example) people did like looking in the crevices for that next thing that could give their character that extra wave dash or what have you. I dare say that's what made smash so much fun.