I do agree with LuigiDude though, just don't allow it. Keep a moderator around who watches the matches and disqualifies anyone who games the system like that. It seems that they could've used some better focus groups though because someone would have (and did) figure this stuff out within days. With that information, Sakurai and co could've completely eliminated these game breaking glitches.
I've argued at length with tournament organizers on competitive sites: no one is willing to ban infinite grabs because they think it's too ambiguous when it comes to determining what qualifies "releasing" the player from the infinite. Not that this is a strike against the game, it just sucks that it makes 7 characters unplayable in tournaments right off the bat.
I think Brawl was more balanced than Melee but it's also more buggy than Melee.
As for the SSE, it was a colossal waste of time and resources. I don't care if it was being handled by a completely separate development team, the budget that went toward keeping that team working badly needed to be spent on extra testing.
A bug I encountered all the time while playing Brawl was Bowser's player number suicide bug. It works like this: if Bowser grabs someone and takes them over the edge with him on the last stock, the game result is dependent upon controller number.
If Bowser does this and he's player 1, he wins the match. If he does this when he's player 2, and his victim is player 1, it goes to sudden death.
I can understand some bugs and glitches not being caught in beta testing, but this is a situation which happens incredibly regularly, forcing Bowser players to change their tactics based upon
which player number they are.
When a match starts, I need to pay attention to which location Bowser starts from because that determines which player # the game sees me as.
This bug is unacceptable, and it's unacceptable because I cannot fathom how it managed to slip through the cracks in beta testing. I don't know how many hours were spent by how many testers, but to suggest that no Bowser player used the Bowsercide maneuver and thought it odd that the game went to sudden death instead of giving him a win like last time is hard to imagine.
I've read about Bungie's testing "facility", and I mean that they have an entire building that was dedicated to testing Halo 3 in everything from single player to multiplayer under any and all conceivable circumstances, and this is for a console which can actually release patches and updates for its games to fix bugs post-release.
Nintendo doesn't have that kind of leeway, so why was the beta testing for what is undoubtedly one of their most popular multiplayer franchises so utterly inept?
If Sakurai had infinite time and resources with this game, the only logical conclusion was that he just didn't give a ****. I realize that he wanted to "balance the playing field" for all kinds of gamers, but that doesn't excuse overlooking game-breaking bugs, especially ones which even casual players will probably come across.
I hope the next SSB is done by someone with a little more attention to detail when it comes to testing. Sakurai was more interested in creating meaningless single player modes and minigames and other crap than he was ensuring the core gameplay was intact and bug-free.