I'm a bit late to this thread, and I'm just looking from the outside in since I don't have the game yet. But I'd say his zoning IS bearable, recovery, meter build and chip all withstanding. The problem is that as others have mentioned, he does still have plenty of good buttons in close quarters without really having to use resources to get juice out of them, which in turn just gives him leeway to save his meter for, well, zoning...
But that's just my opinion for what it's worth. A lot of other new characters might have the same kind of skewed economics that nobody has really deciphered yet. Let's not start preaching "just one patch" right after "one more patch" just got exposed as a pack of fibs at the end of MKXL.