Hi JoeyTones, it’s a combination of several factors, and I simply don’t believe any of them will get better in any time soon. A lot of them have been discussed already in several forums so feel free to skip this wall-o-text.
The first and foremost is what I see as selection bias applied by Capcom in an e-sport competitive level play. At this point I think Capcom has an agenda to sell their DLC, specifically to Westerners. It is very profitable, check euro to yen or dollar to yen conversion ratio. Without the advertised e-sports aspect which should guarantee a fair game for all characters, I don’t think I would have become interested in the game.
That they tried to somewhat streamline and simplify the game from earlier installments is an amendable goal, and very much a requirement for e-sports. I think changing mains in SFV is probably easiest it has ever been in Street Fighters, so instead of mastering a single character, it’s now possible to master several and I think that’s good. But somewhere along the lines it also went quite wrong.
The second thing is the game (reward) mechanics. For me it seems to reward wrong things. There’s a fair bit of guessing game, but if I wanted to play e-sports with probabilities and risk management, Blood Bowl is designed around six sided dice probabilities and does that better and more enjoyably, still managing to give an impression that what player does matters more.
The other player controlling the game and then losing to a massive come back from a single crush-counter combo does not make a very enjoyable gaming experience (either watching or playing) to me. I get that some characters are designed to inflict massive damage quickly and have compensating factors for that, and some characters are designed to inflict damage over a longer period of time. That’s OK. It’s the risk-reward ratio between these characters that’s off.
The third thing is the input lag. It is indeed better than it was in S1, but there are still special moves that cover a large distance that are plain unreactable with their start-up time and the present input lag. Improving the input lag further would improve the neutral game and I think also anti-airing.
The fourth thing is related to what Dime is saying above with reactable stuff. It’s not only related to Chun Li, but I think observational physiology is not actually well thought out in the character design. Some moves by some characters are very easy to see like Chun’s overhead, yet some overheads are harder to react to, which tend to be vertical hand movements. Moves of the same class like overheads tend to have about similar frame data since it’s easy to argue that it’s only fair.
But it’s actually a problem if the extent of the movement changes between characters. The human vision system reacts faster to a larger movement, and especially lateral movements. It would be interesting to see the frame data taking into account the observational physiology, but that’s not gonna happen.
In other times, the game is very misleading on the animations making it unintuitive to see if something is punishable or not, forcing the player to read the frame data or do hit box studies earlier than they are actually ready to commit hours for something like that. I know it can’t always be perfect, but averagely it seems a bit too much off. Sometimes it’s hard to say if something can even be hit or not even in the neutral game; Chun’s cr.MK being my biggest grief as her feet can clearly go behind the opponent’s ankle, but no hit is registered even then. Ryu’s st.LK is another similar annoyance, but apparently it was restored.
Worse, the distance is also inconsistent, due to animations and hurt boxes differing substantially between characters. This requires me to study the opponent’s hurt boxes for simple things when the visual cue of my character’s limb length really should be good enough for the majority of normal button attacks.
The Fifth thing is that the game is actually quite bad at teaching you its core mechanics and basic fighting game concepts such as zoning, getting around zoning, anti-mashing, shimmies, staggers and mix ups. I’ve met Silver level players who didn’t understand their main crush counters and then complained about my rookie Season 2 Chun overwhelming them in neutral. I also don’t get why the trials do not include actual commonly used combos (BnBs, punishes, etc) now that the game has been played for a year. This would be a better introduction to character IMO.
Sixth is the FM policy of Capcom. The way it is distributed is simply odd and counter-intuitive. I played the game to unlock all characters up to Ed to get some kind of an idea of them all. But the weekly 5000 FM per a story mission is a totally different world compared to the 50 FM awarded per online win. It’s apparent that Injustice 2 and Tekken 7 that have scared Capcom of the player base actually remaining in the game, thus the FM is now coming in droves. It’s just that it appears as bribing to me.
Fun fact: apparently removing the account from Capcom Unity removes also all the posts made under that account 
