Competitive Gaming with fighting games: extra points 5

Step 8: Don't immediately dismiss Player vs. External Element.
This has been my message to the smash community for several months now, and it's just finally getting through my head that they don't care about logical reasoning regarding the stages that can be used in competition, but rather would just come to a general consensus over what "feels" right (and you can't really judge them for it... after all, it is just a game). And what feels right for them is that what should dominate in combat is the Player vs. Player aspect.
Time for a little background knowledge here. In Smash, each fight has the following setup: Player vs. Player (vs. Player) (vs. Player) vs. Stage (vs. Items). The items in brackets can be turned off by changing the game mode, or in-game settings. The ones outside of the brackets cannot be turned off-they can be minimalized, to an extent, but cannot be turned off. A more recent model slated the parts that you cannot turn off more accurately as Player+Stage vs. Player+Stage. What the smash community has tried to do is limit the effects that the stage has on competition. This means, in a game with 41 stages, banning all but between 3 and 15 of them (usually between 9 and 12), based on many of them emphasizing player interaction with the stage in a way they don't like, and forcing the first round of the match to start on one of the least interactive stages in the game.
However, when you think of it in competitive terms, how does removing the stage-based elements that move, or can hurt the player, in a game where each stage is massively different, improve the competitive depth of the game? As said, it's always going to be Player+Stage vs. Player+Stage, even on the most simple of stages. By allowing stages which are "different", there is no lowering of competitive depth (Perhaps due to overcentralizing strategies and/or randomness, but I covered that in my first post). Instead, when you remove stages, you drastically reduce the number of effectively different situations, leading to the competitive depth of the game being lowered.
This does not apply only to smash! Sure, building stage hazards into most competitive fighters is hard. But look at Tekken 4 (which unfortunately bombed). Its stages are so much cooler than any Tekken game before it. If you would, say, remove all but the flat, open stages, you would remove an amazing amount of competitive depth. Look at Soul Calibur's various incarnations-there's almost no reason to ever ban a stage! I mean, the "earthquake" stage from Soul Calibur 3 is exactly what I'm talking about-it's different and hazardous, and leads to some very, very cool mindgames-do I block the earthquake, or try to hit my opponent with a grab or a medium/overhead attack before it hits? Such "third-party interferences" can be incredibly refreshing, and an incredibly easy way to drastically increase competitive depth-as long as they aren't excessively random and are done intelligently (i.e. no lasers coming from the side of the screen in a game like Street Fighter). Warning: if you are not very clear about the fact that the stage variance is a competitive element, the playerbase very well may bitch and moan like nobody's business, and you won't even really be able to tell them that they're wrong.