What does a player need to learn to reach Bronze, Silver, Gold and Plantinum?

Yup

Anti airs
Proper meaties
The ability to blow up common tactics and gimmicks
A firm handle on your character’s tools
Hit confirms

This alone will get you to super plat

Then the big leap from super plat to ultra plat/diamond comes with mind games, management of risk/reward, and how well you can play neutral. In ultra plat and beyond is where you will really see the critical thought process shine with 80-90 percent of the players.

Stop blaming rage quitters, they’re really just a nuisance, not even an obstacle to ranking up

Casual is just for people who want to play different players, or pussies that don’t want to lose their rank.

Bronze is more or less just being able to consistently hit inputs. Silver is just learning your character. What buttons are good, what set-ups work, what to do on wake-up. Gold is mainly just learning how to deal with gimmicks, because at the Silver stage most people can play their own characters but are kind of iffy on match-ups, so you will see a lot of “Imma just do my thang”. Higher than that I can’t really say because it’s beyond my skill level.