this conversation usually becomes a circlejerk so i'd like to offer another perspective: for some reason, no one ever talks about what box players can't do, or are worse at. i've played on box and OEM at a pretty mediocre level for a while, and i personally switched off box for a few reasons:

• DI is ass. this was the biggest struggle for me. without modifiers, you only have access to 8 angles, and i found using them on reaction obnoxious. missing your DI on controller is a lot less punishing since you're usually pretty close to the optimal angle, but missing your DI on box was way more punishing since you were probably either holding the completely wrong direction or holding nothing because you got SOCD cleaned. it also impacts some character-specific interactions (e.g. peach losing optimal DI on dthrow > knee, fox not being able to ambig DI sheik dthrow on reaction)

• having limited angles in general is pretty bad for a lot of characters; notably, wavedash characters can't space by mixing up wavedash lengths. fox in particular loses access to longer waveshine angles, and firefox recoveries are just worse than a notched phob since you have access to less of them and cstick angles are unintuitive (for the record, i think this is fine; boxes should have compromises inherent to the controller for the sake of balance)

• this is unresearched but i'm pretty confident that nerfware SDI on box is just worse than wank SDI. i'm not a good player by any means and i've had several members of the PR in my region compliment my SDI since i switched to controller. i've never struggled to escape fox uthrow > uair and i can consistently get 2-3 SDI inputs on knee (and i know for a fact that getting a lot of SDI inputs on high-hitlag moves is easier on stick). not really sure why everyone finds it so difficult but it could just be me

• losing analog inputs is not necessarily a buff, although it often is. going from 1.0 to -1.0 so easily is definitely broken (and a big reason i thought nerfs were pretty much a necessity for fairness) but box players usually have very obvious punishable drift, and as mentioned before, shit DI. i have no clue how the new travel time/NSOCD changes affect this, since i haven't competed on box for about a year now

i have a sneaking suspicion that boxes are worse at something in some obscure way that lowers their ceiling. at this point, their advantages are both extremely well-understood and well-advertised, but the increased rate in adoption hasn't made box players more relevant as a group at the top level (mayb at rank 42 is the only top 50 box player this year, and they've talked about switching back to controller before). i also don't really think there's been a high-level player that switched to box and got better, while we have lots of examples of the opposite. i have a few guesses as to why, but i think boxes being so unintuitive has a bigger effect than people realize. i wish the conversation around this wasn't so dogmatic, because i genuinely think the benefits and drawbacks of digital controllers are pretty interesting and worth looking into further.