A newbie Claw player will never successfully be able to Walldive for free and hope to land that on a solid player, not even top, but just solid player. First off, the newbie Claw player would have to have a good understanding of cross ups and execution in controlling the wall dives so that he can continue to make it effective, otherwise, he’s basically what he is, a newbie hoping for the best, and thus will eat AA’s, air throws, air to air attacks, etc, etc.
You cannot walldive effectively unless you know the concept of it well enough to do it consistently and effectively. You watch Tokido and you’ll notice that it isn’t easy, in fact, wall dive shenanigans have been around since Claw debuted in CE. Claw himself as a character isn’t a pick me up stroll around the park either, because learning how to use his pokes, slide, jumping over fireballs, and all inherently isn’t particularly easy in itself, much less just depending on walldive spams.
Watching Sagat match ups in SFII, we’ve seen O. Sagat do his work however go as far back as Champion Edition (A Sagat even more beastly then O. Sagat mind you). You see barrages of Tiger Shots, and if your not that solid in the game you start thinking to yourself “Wow, that’s mindless gameplay right there”. However believe me when I say this…doing Low Tiger zoning is not an easy feat, simply for the fact that, “if” you don’t know now how to grasp when to launch Tiger shots, you will suffer huge consequences for doing so, because one mistake will cost you a magnitude of your life.
For example, even guys like Jeff stated on the superior capabilities of Tomo’s legendary spacing ability. I remember him speaking about how he could never ever beat, or lock down Tomo’s Guile using Sagat, ever. Simply because Tomo’s positioning game was so far ahead of everyone else’s, that he would methodically get in, jump awards and punish your limbs whenever you throw out a Tiger shot. We all know that typically two solid lvl players that Guile vs Sagat should be an edge to Sagat, however not in this case, simply due to the fact that Tomo’s mastering of the most important values of SFII was beyond everyone elses.
The simple reasons are this, “doing” the moves in SFII is a already a concept new players will struggle with, however incorporating this in, and understanding the footsies, spacing, zoning of SFII is the real test of a good player. Reasons why the gaps are so vast, because a solid player with an understanding of these will downright butcher newbie players, however a top lvl player will utterly destroy solid players, while the cream of the crop, the super elites (A Tomo in his Prime for example) just basically owns everyone for free. So simply put, there are very huge gaps between lvl of players in SFII.