Butting in on your response to Kuroppi, how do you define “accessible”? Do you mean “having special moves that most people can perform consistently”? (Let’s recall, you are talking specifically about special move inputs, as indicated by the fact that you go on to talk about a select few people in your area who were able to perform SPDs when World Warrior came out, and how cool that was.)
If that is what you mean, then what’s wrong with it? What’s the point of masking access to the game behind extra layers of higher dexterity requirement for certain characters? Is Street Fighter not deep enough that you have to add cheap barriers to entry for some characters, to make it interesting?
If you were playing a game that allowed you to design your own character from scratch, and then use that character vs. other people’s original characters, would you give him/her extra difficult special inputs, just to make him/her interesting?
I’m all for specials requiring more complex inputs, as long as the difficulty of performing them is consistent across the board, for all characters. Making certain characters’ inputs weirdly more difficult than everyone else is the very essence of cheap and lazy game design, and actually betrays a lack of designers’ confidence in their own game mechanics (e.g. “this move is overpowered, so let’s just make it so only a few people can do it consistently”). Death to that. (Fortunately, that practice is becoming outdated, as modern fighting games tend to have less and less of that going on.)
How quickly we change our tune. Just a few days ago, you were citing HDR’s bugs as one reason for your preferring ST. (“HDR has some good fixes like wall dive not knocking down and add 2 more frames to osagat fireball. But it comes with a bunch of bugs, input lag, ugly graphics, etc.”)
Fine. And Sirlin’s changes to ST are what make HDR tourneys so exciting. Finals with a greater diversity of characters, for starters, and you even have low-tier characters occasionally placing high or even winning. Not the same old shotokan/Boxer/Sim/Claw finals that you get over and over again in a vanilla ST competition. (And to Sirlin’s credit, you still don’t have low tier characters dominating the proceedings. They still have to work their tails off, and they’re really no more attractive to scrubs. It’s good enough that they at least show their faces in top eight, now – which they could virtually never do, before.)