I'm familiar with it, he's been on about this basically since the game came out. one or two a year is nothing, there were 9 NA tournies this weekend. items play is sheer novelty, there aren't a significant number of people who want it
smash does have a pretty active competitive community but you're right in that it's in spite of nintendo, it could be much more if they were even remotely supportive of it. that's why I'm hoping namco gets a lot of freedom with it and sakurai doesn't pull an other m on us where the third party has no input, if this is brawl 2.0 I won't bother getting it