So a question about taunting

A little background first. Now I have been out of the community since Evo last year due to school and other personal reasons. So during this time the only play time with any fighting games I had was online (mostly UMVC3 if you must know). As you can expect it, I ran into some assholes but it did get me thinking a bit. Eventually I had to ask, why does pretty much every modern fighting game feature taunting in some way even though it serves no purpose to the gameplay in general? I understand in 3S and AOF that taunting had a specific gameplay purpose (giving some small buff/setup and reducing your opponent’s spirit gauge respectively), but now it just seems to be there included for the sake of being there likes it’s a requirement for a good fighting game like how good netcode is. Sure there maybe a few exceptions in a given fighting game, but in general isn’t just not taking the optimal damage/setup at worst or wasted animation and voice work not seen that often at best? I mean every character in SSF4 has 10 different taunts. How many of them have you seen in a match? I just been thinking about this off and on for around a week in my free time and figured I might as well ask the question to others to see what I get.

Your question doesn’t need a thread.
You could have asked it on the general discussion thread at the top.

Cuz there’s no better way of telling someone they ain’t shit then by using a completely useless/pointless piece of tech.

I like how Taunting/Respecting works in Guilty Gear. That’s pretty cool.

Oh yea and what Hecatom said.