Most stages are banned.
Battlefield is the most popular stage in Melee, Smashville in later games.
Items are complete and utter bullshit and anyone who's ever played and wanted to win knows it. Nobody likes charging a forward smash only to have a bob-omb land on top of you, or an invincibility star spawning right on top of your enemy.
Sakurai is inattentive as shit if he actually thinks anyone likes Final Destination. That stage is one of the least balanced stages in every game it's been. Marth, Fox and Falco have gigantic advantages over the rest of the cast on it in Melee, Ice Climbers dominates there in Brawl and Little Mac/Diddy Kong both get pretty big advantages there in 4. Smashville is way better.
Nobody considers Brawl inferior just for tripping. Tripping was stupid as hell, but that's not why it was inferior. It was inferior because it rewards defensive play far more. It wasw inferior because you could get out of any combo by mashing the airdodge button, since airdodging canceled hitstun after about a quarter of a second. It was inferior because Meta Knight was far and away the best character in the game and, due to earlier-mentioned problems, the only
fun character in the game if you're playing against people who are actually good.
You have to completely and utterly ignore the entire competitive scene if you think no items, fox only, final destination is even remotely close to the truth.
Here's a match from one of the biggest tournaments of 2013. It's Young Link vs. Ness at first, then Young Link vs. Jigglypuff later. Jigglypuff is considered to be one of the best characters in the game and Ness one of the worst, but both are played here. And Fox, Falco, Marth, Sheik, Peach and Captain Falcon (the stereotypical top tier characters) are nowhere to be seen, nor is Final Destination. This is not entirely unusual, except for Ness being played.