Well I can most certainly say why I voted Advanced :
I remember the early times of NSMB hacking in 2008-2009 (a.k.a. NSMBe 2.2 and NO$GBA days of glory), at that time I wanted to do a remake of SMB and SMB Lost levels all in one (original I know).
If I remember correctly the editor didn't have support for editing entrances (as well as a lot of things) and you had to edit that "manually" (I know for one it was a pain, mostly due to lack of documentation at time).

But most importantly I was the one who discovered the placeholder data for Kyurem's alternate formes as well as providing the egg moves list for Pokémon Black & White, both of which definitely requires Hex reading comprehension (yes I am the one known as MeroMero in Smogon forums, no I don't play Pokémon anymore as of February 13th 2013 so don't ask me Pokémon related data).

Oh and this : http://nsmbhd.net/thread/1850-understanding-challenge-mode/
http://nsmbhd.net/thread/1851-changing-challenge-mode-values-tutorial/

 TRS, it's not against you don't worry, I know you said "a lot" not "all", and even if you didn't ask for it I give my reasoning behind my vote (I couldn't help but feel targeted).
If you happen to disagree with me feel free to say so I will be interested to see your reply, since you're one of the oldest people on this board I know it will be justified.

And, I say I'm advanced cause I can:

Make levels
Make tilesets
Edit textures
Edit the sprite textures
Edit the intro textures
Make backgrounds
And learning to ASM hack (Gonna start with SNES ASM hacking, and end with [believeit]Wii[/believeit] hacking *if i find tutorials for wii and ds hacking*)

And if Dirby is not extreme, NO BODY HERE IS EXTREME

Aka, normal.

I think I'm simple, I do edit levels, tilesets and backgrounds, but thats kinda it.

I think I am Advanced. I am able to do anything I like to expect of ASM-Hacking (I am learning...). Also I made my first (working) music hack yesterday
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GitHub - Kuribo64 - YouTube

OK. Great! Can you please tell me where you learn ASM from, RicBent?

I Fixed The Annoying Thread Title. Yay.

Also this thread is getting quite interesting

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Lemme explain why I voted Complex and not Extreme:
I'm a programmer, so I know how to code. Learning ASM is just like learning another programming language. Sure, it's way more low level than normal programming languages. That's because it's not designed to be easily read/written by programmers, it's designed to be executed by the CPU. So yeah, learning ASM is one step further from learning C/C++, but it's not a very big step.

So, now you've learned ASM. You know how to read ASM and do modifications to it. Now what? NSMB's code is huge. Megabytes of ASM code, without any comments or function names or variable names. So what do you modify?

That's the big challenge. You have to understand how NSMB works internally to do interesting stuff. And that's no easy task. Most of what we know from the inner workings of NSMB comes from Treeki and his work on NSMB DS and (mostly) NSMBW. And it requires lots of time. Time he's been able to invest in this, and I haven't as much.

(Sure, you can poke around with the RAM search in DeSmuME, find where the amount of lives/coins/whatever is stored in RAM and do lulzy stuff with it (That's what Action Replay code makers do: OMG HAX LOOK 99 LIVES FOREVER). That's not cool.)

So that's why I'm leaving the "Extreme" rank for Ninjifox (and other people...? )

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So, this is how I'd classify the ranks, in order to standarize the votes a bit (It seems everyone's voting according to different criteria)

• Newbie: Umm, where do I download the NSMB ROM? And .NET Framework? Oh, okay, got it. Let's move some objects around and make a hack!
  
  
• Simple: I can make cool new levels, I understand sprites, sprite data, entrances, views, paths and stuff enough to make awesome levels!
  
  
• Regular: Hey look, custom tilesets! And BGs! And graphics My hack looks custom amd pretty.
  
  
• Advanced: Yay, I understand how palettes work, and I can do black magic with them. Multi-palette tilesets, blah blah. I can h3x 3d1t c0d35, 1m 50 31337!
  
  
• Complex: ASM haxx0rz. Nice. I can do interesting short ASM hax0rz. And I dream in h3x c0d35.
  
  
• Extreme: Hey! I know everything about NSMB. I can trash the world map and code my own. I can make custom bosses!
  

Please take these as a guide. These aren't a strict progression or anything. I know it's possible to understand hex stuff without having ever done a multipalette tileset. Meh.

And don't get offended, this is just a poll for fun! You can always LEARN MOAR if you want

Well, then I am regular :p

I'm still advanced. I know how palettes work, I do multi-palette tilesets and many things about NSMB.

And nice new post layout, Dirby! ^^

Between regular and advanced
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New Super Mario Bros. The Next Levels.
Progress:
W1: 100% | W2: 100% | W3: 33% | W4: 100%

Probably same with me.

The post layout was from  Superstarxalien169. He styled User ID 1 instead of his.
Enough offtopic please.

Well, I voted for Newbie, because I always end up ragequitting NSMBe when it comes to selecting a ROM file.
I cannot manage to find one since four years now. Still, I come back here everyday again, in hope to once hack NSMB without having such a "ROM".

Can someone please post here a working ROM link?