1st question - my only concern is that there are some chars who either are too slow or have incredibly limited approach options. Clock Tower overpowers certain mattchups because if these characters lose the lead to certain ones will excellent projectile/walls there is 0 chance to come back barring user error. Like I agree Clock Tower is a decent stage, but there's some concerns with it as well.

2nd question - more or less, new physics make walkoffs/the pit of death less terrible than they seem- will grant it's equally as polarizing as Clock Town and is also an outlier- deserves testing tbh but yes Clock Tower is a better option. Also stage layout is pretty ok.

Independently:

One ruleset which starts off liberal is more than sufficient, meanwhile testing Hazards on seems ok but i also feel it would make an incredibly small stagelist due to certain hazards making a ton of viable stages... well not. Not sure what Hazards besides Dreamland wouldn't make the stage unusable- though that is an interesting idea.

idk about hazards on for everything but it would help to narrow things down and make stage striking more important if we just did neutrals only first match and then hazards on for all counterpicks after that or something of the sort

anything to actually get people not to just pick fd or smashville so we can fledge out the meta... beta is balanced w character/stage combinations in mind

While I see your reasoning, people simply aren't going to go for that, sorry.

If hazards are enabled for counterpicks, competitors are going to want to avoid them. And to do that, they'll counterpick Smashville and FD.

Dracula Castle w/ Hazards is better than w/o in my opinion

This. The stage was fine before outside of lag (which really isnt a concern anymore), so there shouldnt be any doubt about it being legal again in the first place. The hazards also add to the stage overall imo. Hazardless Dracs is kinda bland

So make a ruleset that discourages that? Or show why it's important

It's not that simple. People are going to be disagree on whether it is important. And when people disagree with the ruleset, they ignore it and make their own. That's exactly what happened with v0.9b and the Slackroom. That's what happened with Melee's early life and the continental divide over the use of items.

If we want variety, there's going to have to be some compromise. If we make a rule such as "no starter stages allowed during the counterpick phase", they're going to ignore it and use the Gentlemen's Clause to pick Smashville or FD. The fact is, competitors don't like stage hazards. Forcing them to use them isn't going to make them use them.

I believe enabling hazards for counterpicks would also upset people who like Tower of Salvation in particular, one of the most popular counterpicks there are. Nobody is going to want to play a tournament match with Mythos Yggdrasil interfering.

the way I see it, tournaments won't go beyond playing online mode because no one is willing enough to branch out and play with no input lag in person (and because kids are young and can't actually go places for local tournaments lol). I don't see the harm in allowing certain stage hazards to be enabled for tournaments, especially since they're all in online mode and have nothing on the line (money, prizes, etc.)

Certain ones, yes.
Dracula's Castle, Central Highway, Dream Land, and World Tournament are all stages whose hazards could potentially work. But let's not get too crazy.

TOS hazard johns need to be shut down. Everything is choreographed and happens in the same order and specific attacks affect different types of characters. Look to Brawl's stagelists for inspiration. Regardless though if our counterpicks are hazards on it will encourage more diversity in neutrals, TOS would be considered too neutral to be a CP and not polarizing in any way so it would probably make a great starter.

I propose we run tournaments with both ruleset and compare results and feedback and then converge from there

you can propose it all you like but in all honesty nobody is going to want to play with the hazards

people dealt with the hazards in brawl. if there was a toggle to turn them off, people would have turned them off, easily.

people have no interest in fighting the stage, people want to fight their opponent. the most frustrating thing one could possibly do is force them to dodge hazards while playing the neutral.

even if there is no money on the line people want to win because they outplayed the opponent, not because their opponent forgot the stage attacked them.

riddle me this: the idea of a counterpick is to counterpick your foe, right? its not to pick a stage slightly wider or a stage with a single platform. yes there are differences, but the differences are so minuscule that they p much don't matter. this is why nobody striked in 9b.

i'm fine if we only want to play neutrals a-la some other official fighters... but let's not bother with stage striking and keeping the facade up that we've got 'counterpicks'
people are just going to GM to the same stage every time because stage striking takes too long and it doesn't matter what stage they end up on in all actuality bc the stagelist is full of fd variants with 10-pixel differences in blast zones and 1-3 platforms.

we could just say "hazards off, here's the list of legal stages" and call it a day
that way TO's dont have to bother writing out unused stage striking rules so players can elect to strike between
"fd, slightly wider fd, fd with one platform, fd with one moving platform, fd with two platforms on the outside, smaller fd, fd with 3 platforms" and waste 10 mins per set

rofl

if nobody striked in 9b that's the stagelist's problem but forcing gimmicks isn't going to help that

as much as i hate to be honest either the stagelist needs a larger percentage of different but balanced stages or the game needs better-designed competitive stages.

stages like battlefield and smashville as a whole tend to be very neutral. pokemon stadium 2 in project m is very popular because of how neutral the stage is. perhaps there's just too many stages.

if there are too many stages to choose from then of course stage striking is gonna take 20 minutes. but as someone who plays smash 4 regularly, stage striking takes less than a minute, even in some cases 30 seconds. we don't have 11 stages, we have 6.

i dont think stage hazards that are competitively viable are 'forcing gimmicks' but i'm up to discussion, a lot of them are designed to work in competitive play specifically for the reason of stagelist diversity (ex. hylian skies - everyone complains about wall infinites, now the wall goes away after a bit, or world tournament everyone complains about walk offs, now the ground is basically a blast zone). somehow still though they get blanket-statemented and skipped right over instead of analyzed and hazards on anything is instantly memes.

the game does have good diversity with a more open-minded stagelist but it seems we're too busy banning anything remotely different (look at the saturn valley discussion for example, "we should ban beta sv because it has a 10 degree slope that you can't do dash attacks down") leaving us with just alternate fd's, and THAT is the reason why no one strikes. striking or not the stages are all virtually the same and have 0-5% chance of affecting the outcome. why bother?

never once in the 9b meta did i hear someone say "this stage selection was smart and will put x player at an advantage", because that aspect of the meta honestly did not exist. it's not that 30-some-odd seconds is too long, its just that the 30 seconds is just wasted time because picking a specific stage is virtually useless in the meta, people just use stages that run the best on poopy computers or whatever they personally feel like looks the best. why would i spend time striking between fd 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or sv when it takes 1/10th of the time to say "wanna play on sv"?

hope that makes sense

I feel like this is the case becaues ssf2 doesn't have as nuanced movement. The existence of walls in Yoshi's vs Battlefield doesn't matter much if there is no walljump, samus can't grapple walls, and spacies can't pick analog sweetspot angles. Whether falco can fullhop to the top platform of a Battlefield clone matters less if falco can't waveland. The obvious solution to this problem is to ban all characters except sandbag.