Well, the idea stemmed from watching Blanka
sweep, corpse hop, RC Electricity
The eletricity effectively stops all wake up attempts, hell, RC’d or not. Programming that pattern in training mode and trying to defeat it let to that conclusion. Where most people who have an invincible dragonpunch would go for it if they saw you standing overthem waiting for the wake up, or any kind of wake-up reversal, Blanka’s pattern stops it.
The same goes for Chang’s trap. You catch them in a corner, and throw out Choi first, who starts spinning like a gust of wind going up, and immediately followed by the Spinning ball to complete the trap. Choi’s spinning attack is a multi-hitting move, a FAST one, and this cannot be a coincidence, it does fuck up people’s commands, and allows Chang to either pound them in the air and cease for sending Choi out again, or either chipping or guard crushing them to death.
While his trap works without Choi, it’s much better if Choi is thrown out, because it stuffs the wake-up attempts. Hell, you can wake up and c.fp with Athena and knock Chang out of his trap and then teleport out of there, but not it Choi is coming your way. There isn’t a response for a few reasons, but the primary one is the same as Blanka Electricity, your imput is jammed.
The result is you must block, and when in Blockstun even a Character as small as Athena will get pounded by the spinning ball.
With that in mind, you can take advantage of Athena’s dragonpunch, simply because many don’t consider it to be effective at all. It’s not really abusable for anything other than this purpose, but you can bait people into it after a knockdown from anything like maybe a tigerknee’d Phoenix Arrow, or a simple sweep by walking up to them and dodging before they get up, cancelling the dodge with her kick dodge attack and immediately cancelling that into her dragonpunch.
As a lot of people would be inclined to throw you when you dodge, especially when you foolishly dodge above them when they’re a corpse. Hell, even if they didn’t throw, and intended to do something else, they’d get hit by it because it screws with all moves, RC’d or not.
The only exception to this appears to be supers, because I level 3 SCB’d out of Blanka’s Electricity before after the sweep, hop set-up.
While her fireball is almost guaranteed chip, her recovery is too slow, and things like RC’d Blanka Balls will fuck that shit up in a heartbeat. And with the fireball comes crucial timing, because of her recovery, and hell the opponent recovers faster from the hit than Athena does if it’s done too close, and she’ll get punished.
You are right though that it is safer, it really depends on the character you are fighting. Stilll, this is just another thing to think about with her dragonpunch move.
For me though, this is a good reason to use it:
At the end of the match, because of the “jamming” of the dp, it’s a guaranteed hit or guaranteed chip, and it does enough of either to finish a character off.