Ok as someone not explicitly part of the Melee community I can excuse you for thinking that Nintendo allowed us to be at EVO the past 2 years (soon to be 3), but that statement is just not true. For EVO 2013 the TO's had room for one extra game and they held a facebook poll to see which game it would be. Melee fans came out in full force and dominated the poll, but they thought we were just botting so they decided to hold a fundraising campaign (supported breast cancer I think, not 100% sure) to see which game would make it. Melee was in a close fight with skullgirls but just barely won out in the end and so they finally allowed us to be the last game at the tournament. Nintendo as a company couldn't stop us from playing in the tournament since they can't legally stop us from playing the game. But at that time they thought we were fanatics (thats a quote), so they did the next thing they could which was they tried to stop EVO from streaming Melee. This led to massive backlash from thousands of people, even many not in the Melee community. Nintendo was forced to withdraw the ban in about 5 hours to avoid a PR scandal. In summary Nintendo not only didn't help us get into EVO, they actually tried to hinder our community at EVO, so I think you can understand why almost everyone in the smash community, especially Melee and PM players, dislikes Nintendo involvement.
Europeans actually are not required to acquire a version of NTSC as the PAL version is actually the tournament version there. When Americans and Japanese people travel to Europe they play using European rules, including the PAL version (which many think is more balanced since Falco, Fox, and Sheik all received nerfs). Plus only the top 10-15 or so European players ever travel to America for tournaments and they are all good enough to adjust to the difference. Regarding the SSB4 scene being larger than the Melee scene in Europe, I would say evidence shows otherwise as at BEAST V (largest euro tournament to date), there were 140 SSB4 entrants and 370 Melee entrants, which is a much bigger difference than at APEX (1030 Melee entrants, 800 SSB4 entrants). I'll type a longer response later tonight since I'm busy rn. I don't actually live in Europe so I don't have first hand experience, but again the numbers seem to say that Melee is perfectly fine in Europe.
