I’ve gone over my reasons for like HDR over ST a few times in other threads, but what the hell, everyone else is retreading.
I’ll state up front that I did not start playing ST until last year. Prior to that I stuck with Hyper Fighting, and eventually AE (wherein I didn’t pick the ST guys anyway). Once I got the Dreamcast ST port my friends and I started playing it, and Michigan actually hosted an ST tourney - which is something, considering the game was never popular here in the first place, and still isn’t.
So when I say I have no particular bias for the older game, because I haven’t been getting used to everything about it for years upon years, bear that in mind. Quite simply, I agree with Sirlin’s overall objectives for HD Remix: compress the tiers, weaken fireball games, and make it easier for new people to get into the game.
I like that throw loops are weaker, even though I myself play Balrog and go for his all the time. I like that Vega’s dive is weaker, that Chun Li’s neckbreaker and super are less powerful, and that Gief has more to work with. I like moves having motions that are intuitive and not hurt by the random input window. So called “pointless” changes like Machine Gun Upper or Ryu’s fake didn’t hurt the game at all, so I can’t complain there. And I especially like that randomized move inputs are gone. Could the game use some more tweaking? Of course; Akuma could get toned down some more, and Fei, Cammy, and Hawk could use a little more of a push (even though, from my experience, they’re actually usable now). But considering that I actually play most of the cast now as opposed to like, 2 people from old ST because so many felt so limited in what they could do, I’d call remixing a success.
And who can really miss the O. characters when the only ones that got used were O.Sagat (almost exclusively because he was so ridiculously good), O. Ken, and sometimes O. Hawk? If they were left in, it’d just be more remixing effort for little gain. I don’t know, it seems like most of the complaints I’ve seen leveled against HDR have been by players who don’t like that their game, that they’ve been playing for years, was changed up. Alternately, the complaints stem from areas where arcades are actually still relevant, and the lack of HDR arcade keeps people on ST.
Whether or not the game ultimately replaces ST isn’t something that’s going to happen overnight. Midwest had practically equal numbers of entrants for both, so I don’t think that the scene has split so severely that most of the playerbase is only going to play one or the other. But I imagine most newer players will just go straight to HD, since it’s more accessible.