Regarding meaty attacks.
If you hit your opponent at the end of your active frame, for example say you do a meaty c.mk with ryu, and it hits your opponent on the 5th active frame.
Does this change his frame advantage on hit? Are you able to link certain normals that would be impossible otherwise?
yes. since you can calculate frame advantage by:
opp hitstun - (recovery + active - 1)
the frame data assumes that you hit on the first possible active frame, so taking ryu’s c.mk
with 5 active frames, 12 recovery frames, and 16 frames of hitstun your opponent gets put into,
frame advantage = 16 - (12 + 5 - 1) = 0 like the frame data says
if you do the attack at the last possible frame (5th frame), your opponent is still put into the 16 frames of hitstun like before, but you won’t have to go through 4 frames of the low forward being active, so the frame advantage can be calculated like this:
frame advantage = 16 (12 + 1 - 1) = 4
provided you’re in range, you can link something else in there.