The Misconception Surrounding the Phrase "Match Up"

Many people in the community like to refer to character match up statistics, or how likely one character is to beat another character, as something like a proven statistic. Which it's not. People refer to these "MU" statistics like they are set in stone and that if you play a certain two characters against each other, the favored will win x amount of times out of 10.  This is blatantly wrong in the current game of Smash for Wii U. The idea behind this misconception does have some truth. Some characters struggle against other characters. Like a character that has a hard time recovering, such as Little Mac, would struggle against some other character that is able to get people off the stage easily and gimp them. This doesn't mean that the match up is fixed though. The most important thing in any match of any Super Smash Bros. game is the player. The player's skill level is incredibly important, as they are better with their character, take less hits, make better moves, and overall play very well. Their knowledge is important, such as if they know Luigi has a frame 2 Nair, they will shield in between a combo to block the nair, then re grab. Character knowledge is important for every character too. If you don't know that Ness has an insane back throw, chances are you're going to lose a stock pretty early to it when you play against a Ness player. A players fundamentals are important too. Any player could have insane combo knowledge, but if they lack fundamentals such as teching, mixing up, shielding projectiles on the move, and other basic things that don't have anything to do with the character that you are playing, they are going to lose to someone who just maybe does one hit at a time, and doesn't combo at all, but has really good fundamental skills. Now, returning to this idea of a Match up, people refer to things such as , oh Ryu has a 40/60 match up against Pikachu. So, they are saying he has a slight disadvantage against Pikachu, fair enough, but the fact that they refer to the match up as a statistic baffles me. How do you know that the Ryu doesn't just practice all day against his brother who plays Pikachu, or that the Pikachu hasn't played against many Ryu players. The idea that there is a rate that the character should win and lose is very poorly designed and should be something we as a community strive to get rid of. Any character could beat any other character, even at high level play, and it doesn't matter what these statistics say. Who actually sat down and calculated these stats anyways?