How many Vertices and Triangles are allowed? More specifically, for each character? Is there a list?
Does the brawl engine like anything other than diffuse maps? ie, Specular, Normal (bump), emissive?

I'm not new to modeling, although I can't find a template or anything for modeling for brawl so I'd be modeling blind.

I finally figured it out. It's because of the CSS Fix which I had in the txtcodes. I don't know about Geckos, but with Riivolution, you can't have stars before the code itself.
ie:
CSS Fix [Phantom Wings]:
* 046A0C68 C2000000
* 0469DC18 40820030
* 0469DC40 2C030000
* 04689E88 60000000