You don't have to do those advanced moves to be a good Smash player...because of course most of the people you'll ever play against won't be doing those moves.

It is good to learn some and own your friends occasionally though hehe.

I could wavedash, but it generally requires that you jump with X or Y, but I've always preferred pressing Up to jump...just feels more fluid to me. Plus it's not as fun to constantly wavedash around the field to me.

But L-cancelling on a wall or the floor is a great tech move, it really will save your life once you get the hang of it.

While I really like traditional fighting games, SSBM is superior to them. While it doesn't have that quarter circle + punch type of moves, you get the same effect with the arrow + button attacks. Plus, this game is so much faster paced. This is probably one of the deepest fighting games I've played, and as people said, you will get your ass handed to you if you try to button mash.
Give the game a try. You'll really like it, especially if you play with 4 people. It's the interaction between the people playing that takes this game to 11. But even if you play alone, it's still really fun. Definitely buy it.

Use the environment. My friend would dub me a sniper in Melee because I'd grab items and chuck them and hit my friends across the map. It's also a lot of fun when you throw a box and it suddenly explodes killing everybody on the map.

All those advanced techniques are only really used in tournaments, and the people who know them usually insist on playing 1vs1 matches on the most boring map with just about every single option turned off. They get ridiculed quite a bit on the less hardcore parts of the net, and "no items, Fox only, Final Destination!" is a fairly common meme where Smash Bros is discussed.

Lots of the stuff won't work with Brawl anyway, since they're either based on exploiting a gameplay mechanic that no longer exists, or have otherwise been changed. For example the one called "wave dashing" relied on starting to jump and immediately air dodging in to the lower right or lower left to create a sliding effect. In Brawl you can't air dodge in different directions, only go with the momentum and get a few invincibility frames, so the technique can't be used.

I've also heard some pretty high level tournament players anguish at how they've practiced countermeasures against high level tournament techniques so much, that they've completely forgotten how to play the game "normally", and end up doing extremely bad against complete newbies. There's definitely hope for you yet! =P

the game is great just get it, believe me you won't be dissapointed, you can't really explain this game, you just have to play it

Jesus, I will ask the same question: what the hell am I getting myself into?

This whole page went over my head... I haven't played Smash or even a fighting game before [Wii boxing excluded of course]

Bah, I'll probably get used to it.

That's BS.  Stuff that contributes to victory such as things like knowledge of range, recovery time, priority, technique, and honed reflexes doesn't simply go away outside of tournaments.  A tournament level player will shine equally in and out of tournaments.  Those players were probably just being facetious. 

Ok, I guess I exaggerated just a bit. They weren't losing all the time, but rather astonished at how the newbies managed to knock them out far too many times, and even win a few games. They were expecting to run around in circles around the other guys, but ended up having to play seriously. I'm sure they started winning after remembering how low level tactics are countered, and realised the feinting and mind games they were used to didn't work.

Extremely bad being relative to how well you'd expect them to do here. =P

Fair enough.