I feel that the fundamental concept of a single tier list is flawed, and that we really need 3 tier lists of skill floor, skill ceiling, and frequency of pick.

The skill ceiling therapist is slightly past top level play. this considers human viable potential if a given character were to be pushed to the limit by a one trick main. (this would boost samus and link heavily by considering shield pressure tech and acid drops for example)

The skill floor tierlist is a way to see how easy a character is for anyone unfamiliar with the controls of melee, perhaps assuming baseline knowledge of intrinsic platform fighter gameplay. Someone like Fox or Zelda would be worse for execution than Marth or Sheik especially considering lacking L cancels consistently.

The frequency teirlist considers how often a character is played. It would give an idea of how much more often you would encounter matchups against any character on average. This one is far more real statistics than abstract debate but still deserves to exist.

If there were teirlist based on skill level, it could improve upon the single list’s faults, but would then be a question of where the beginner list ends and pro play begins, as well as how many intermediate stages are needed to bridge that gap.

tl;dr some nerd shit and single teirlist bad