It needs a mid air focus and able to do demon to be decent imo.
The reason I mentioned the HK flip is because it’s being used pretty heavily now in the whole dive kick front or cross over palm mixups, I wanted to kill Akuma’s vortex period lol, I’m totally aware about its screen control both offensively and defensively(Infiltration has been using a lot of s.hp xx HK flip to escape corners these days).
I’d still take the Vanilla damage and stun over those though, we’d still have reasonably good mixups with the x-up tatsu and command dive kick setups but Akuma would hitting like a damn truck man, with certain play styles that would very very lethal (e.g in the hands of Momochi), Akuma’s counter hit fishing game will be scary as hell.
I bet even if they did apply those, people would still cry about the damage and stun neglecting the fact that Akuma must have something that’s insanely good because he’s a low HP character with the lowest stun rate in the entire game @850 (even Seth has 900), kinda like how a lot of people cry about Akuma’s “OMG SO SAFE VORTEX” now.
ps: Just to be clear, I’m not saying Akuma will be a better character if such thing happened (which of course won’t), I only think that he’ll be more fun to play for me that way. Also IMO he’ll still be a very different character than both Ryu & E.Ryu.
One other thing to consider is the tatsu, which allows a bunch of followups. Just swapping Ryu’s tatsu to Akuma would by my understanding deal a severe hit to the repeatability of his setups. He’d still have godlike oki, but not loopable, unless flip and Ryu’s tatsu would create something weird.
My dream character would pretty much be Akuma + active frames + health/stun + Ryu tatsu swap or other vortex murder thing. I want a footsie/zoning character who walks fast, has short combos and isn’t charge-based : / Could probably be done by giving the zoning oriented things from Akuma/ER to Ryu, too.
Balancing via HP = blarg