except melee came out at a time when you couldn't update console games. If he could patch melee at the time Sakurai would have got rid of a lot of stuff in the game he didn't like such as wave dashing.
Melee is a good game but the pedestal people but the game on is ridiculous, there are so many other good fighters current, contemporary and past that it is quite disingenuous to claim that melee is best game ever when people are still finding new tech for super turbo for example.
Truck pushing was lame, free unit with loads of HP and no risks if you lose it. It was not conductive to healthy game play.
Wavedashing was actually intended. Certainly not in the way most people think of it, as in intended before its creation, but Sakurai said in an interview 'of course we noticed it during development', at which point he decided it wouldn't hurt the game if he kept it in, therefore he intended its continued existence, thus intending it. Oh, and, there were patches. 1.00 is different than 1.01, 1.02, and PAL. Sakurai also later acknowledged that it was the most polished of the Smash games, but he also said it was 'too hard' at an even later date.
Further, don't forget the law of subjective valuation. The fact that the FGC respect it now, the fact that it has such large tournaments and such a large playerbase after nearly 15 years, and the mere fact it has such mechanical depth, all lends to the 'one of the greatest games ever' statement. I didn't say best ever, just one of the greatest. I, for example, love Third Strike, and see it as a peer among the greats such as Brood War, Counter Strike Source, just like Melee. I understand if you don't think its pedestal is deserved, but you must grant that there are many who do.
Actually, we just found new info in Melee too, and I certainly don't mean to discredit Super Turbo by this, as I know fairly little about that game. Certain grab release combos work depending on port priority, so the port priority metagame has shifted considerably, since it used to be 'higher priority = better', but now certain bread and butters don't work at certain percents, and do for the other ports. Platform dropping via shield input is also another relatively recent tech to be used to any degree of certainty, and the thorough application of Yoshi parrying was fairly recent as well.
As for truck pushing, I said nothing about it, I was merely pointing out one of the many flawed arguments against it with a little help from an analogy to another game where the developer didn't intend all the myriad necessary results of a game's mechanics, and who later decided he didn't like them, to show how absurd developer worship is, that anything going against their intention being evil is a severely flawed argument.