I will have to agree that the final match of the tournament was obviously skewed towards ZSS due to moveset alone and because of the mechanics there seemed to be little Kirby could do to deal with it. And I know this is an ignorant thing to say but otherwise to me it looked like every competitive Smash match ever; two players trying to hit each other and missing a lot.
Do we know how the people who played in last night's tournament feel about the game? Specifically, how they feel about the game on a competitive level?
In Smash, the movement is a huge part of your mindgame. You see people whiff a lot in smash because people bait approaches then wavedash back,dash dance,intercept or whatever to beat their prediction.
What we saw in that game was ZSS flipping around like crazy and Hungrybox not knowing where to go to put her in a bad situation. To be fair Kirby has never been a combo happy character. But he has also always been a BAD character competitively, though less so in Brawl.
Dunno about their specific impressions, maybe they'll speak, I guess that depends on the terms of the event in general.
Smash has a very fast and very adaptive spacing and zoning game. In most matchups you want to be in control of the main stage platform, so generally forcing your opponent on the platforms above you or to the ledge is creating advantage (except in Brawl where the ledge is actually where you want to be).
Some of their changes actually seem to reflect an understanding of this, they are changing ledge mechnics to make it a weaker defensive position than even in Melee, regrabbing the ledge for invincibility will make hanging on the ledge a very desperate situation.
However... the other change they made, whatever their reasoning destroys a very great offensive use of the ledge, edge hogging. In previous smash games, you could grab the edge at the last second before your opponent used a recovery move to reach it, giving you ledge invincibility and making them whiff, unable to grab the ledge and fall to their stock loss. In smash4, if you grab the ledge while someone else is on it, you steal it and they plummet. Don't know the implications of this yet, really, it may not be a bad thing, but it certainly does make controlling the ledge area significantly less important than it has been. It will probably also make recovering from the ledge significantly more difficult, don't know if that is a bad thing or not.
