In Vanilla 98 Heavy D! is like the only member of the US Sports Team worth playing and even then he’s still not very strong. Fortunately 98 isn’t so harsh that lower tier characters are unplayable. In the updates though pretty much all of the US Sports team was buffed and made pretty solid.
Because the scene is mad diverse and a ton of characters are popular, hard to nail it down. Also what America finds populaur and Japan do are totally different when it comes to characters.
You are literally whining that Capcom keeps putting SF2 characters in Street Fighter when those are the characters that sell games. They aren’t rehashing anything, they are keeping the mandatory mainstay characters in first and adding other shit second. I want nothing more than the US Sports Team to come back, but I also recognize that Japan Team, Iori Team, Kim Team, Fatal Fury Team, Art of Fighting Team, and whatever team they add to get Mai in the game are absolutely the most important characters they NEED to have in the game, and that’s 18 characters right god damn there. K` Team is also arguably just as essential, 21 characters, Psycho Soldier is also a pretty staple team, 24 characters, and Ikari Warriors don’t seem to be going away any time soon, 27 characters.
Depending on how long it takes to make the characters in the game (XIII being a character creation cycle that is quite the god damn time sink), it’s just not feasible to add all the oddball characters people want that just flat out are not as important to the game as the staple characters are.