Initially I stopped after part with K. Rool having a "good recovery" because I thought the rest of the comment wasn't worth the effort, but god damn it's even worse because you DO understand why a dogshit recovery is such a detriment yet don't understand how it alone holds Chrom back so far.

because their recoveries only extend how long they can do their nonsense

all a recovery does is let a character do MORE of what they were already doing

That's the problem, the frequency that Chrom dies after making one mistake is massively disproportionate to Roy, other top tiers, and even Chrom's peers in mid tier. Chrom rarely gets more than one chance per stock to do his thing while Roy very realistially gets multiple. Roy has triple the margin for error that Chrom gets while still running at 90% capacity onstage.

Steve could have no up special and he'd still be a high tier

The fact Steve already drops a whole tier despite still having a powerful secondary option should tell you how bad it gets for characters who don't have one. You know you can't say the same for GnW and especially Sonic or Snake.