Go easy on the tech skill. Sure, hardcore tech skill can be great. Just ask any Super Smash Bros Melee player (the famous claim: Mew2king, one of the best melee players, cannot play Fox for the entire tournament because he's too damn hard on the fingers)-they love the fact that it's ridiculously hard to play the game at a competitive level at all, and they love the massive amount of skill involved. However, ask a Brawl player who doesn't play Melee (like me!) what they think of Melee, and you'll get a lot of people who simply can't deal with the ridiculous tech skill barrier. Just to make this clear, let me pull an example. One of the staple techniques of every character is the Short Hop Fast Fall L-Canceled Aerial. SHFLLing is something most pro players do multiple times a second. Here's how it works: You hit the jump button and release it within approximately 2 frames to keep your jump short (2 frames is the minimum, but it's never above 6, at least not among the viable characters). Immediately after your jump startup ends (same 2-6 frames), you press A plus a direction to do an aerial attack, and then after about another 10-20 frames, you press down to fall faster. Then, as you land, press L. The timing on all of this is very tight, and made even tighter by the almost complete lack of a buffer. And that's an AT that every character needs; some character-specific (but also essential!) ATs such as Waveshining with Fox or Samus's "Super Wavedash" are even harder.
Increasing the tech skill barrier does not negatively affect the depth of the game. However, until you raise it to a degree which is ridiculous, even at the highest level of human ability, you are hardly putting a dent in gameplay depth-SSBM pros nail nearly every tech skill requirement, and it reduces the game, at the highest level, back to what it would be if the tech skill was not there-it merely makes it harder at the beginning level. And what that does can indeed be negative-games with a higher tech skill barrier are far harder for an initiate to pick up and play. It leads to less players getting into the game in the first place. Imagine if the command for a hadoken in street fighter was 236463214 instead of just 236, and shoryuken was 412363214. Would it be a more fun game? Probably not. And at the highest level of play, it wouldn't be much deeper either. This can be an incredibly negative aspect. If you want a game with nothing more than a stupidly high tech skill barrier, I'd recommend Bop-It! Extreme or something similar-it's not deep, it's just difficult, technically.
Now hang on a minute, I hear the melee community screaming out, "but melee would be WAY LESS DEEP without, say, wavedashing!" Yep. It would be. And THIS is why you need to differentiate between two things: necessary tech skill and gratuitous tech skill.
Necessary tech skill is the kind of input you need to do a certain action which is not without a disadvantage. For example, in melee, do you always want to waveland? What about always short hop? You need certain commands to perform certain actions. Hell, games like Brawl, Melee, or Guilty Gear would be unthinkable without 5-6 buttons. I mean, pressing 236HP to do a hadoken is not an excessive tech skill requirement. It is, however, necessary to differentiate a hadoken from, say, a mid strong. Similarly, waveshining in melee. Doing it effectively requires very, VERY good timing. It's brutally hard, and the game has no buffer. But you don't always want to do it. And furthermore, you need those commands to differentiate the different actions in the game, and to pull off the tech, you need to input them with a very strict buffer.
Gratuitous tech skill... THE big example which comes to mind is L-canceling in melee. L-canceling is an advanced technique in which you press the shield button right as you land with an aerial attack. By doing so, you halve the lag on the landing. This AT alone turned melee from a solid game into an AMAZING game. But it's terrible design. Why? Because you would never not want to L-cancel if you could. In situations like this, it's usually better to cut out the tech skill. Melee would be exactly the same game at a higher level, but more approachable at a lower level (warning: making L-cancelling automatic still leaves you with a ridiculously hard game! Don't get too excited, Stubbyfingers). The tech skill isn't giving the game anything new at a high level-it's simply forcing you to do another (almost) frame perfect input in an already blisteringly fast game. This, similar to the example above of replacing Hadoken's 236HP input with 236463214HP, is not making the game a better game at all until you reach the point where the tech skill cannot realistically be achieved effectively, at which point... Eh, you're better off just dropping it altogether (see also: this RETARDEDLY HARD advanced technique with king DDD in brawl that nobody will EVER be able to do consistently. EVER!).
My advice: make certain "Advanced techniques" (special attacks, such as the street fighter supers/ultras or the TvC Hypers lend themselves especially well to this) very hard to execute, but make the normal stuff relatively simple to execute (note: DO NOT TRIVIALIZE IT. SNKvsC2 made this mistake by making every attack executable with a direction on one analog stick... this is a very, very bad idea! It makes the player feel very stupid, and simplifies gameplay too much. Some tech skill is good. No tech skill, or too much tech skill, or worse, Gratuitous tech skill, is bad).
(This is, honestly, more opinion than most things, but it's based on a fair bit of observation.)
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