I'm going to have to disagree. I forgot to mention that in a previous patch, Reptile also got his 7 frame d3 (his fastest poke used to be 9 frames) and a bunch of damage buffs (his bnbs which currently do low 30s now used to do even less). So to recap, Reptile had no safe specials to build meter or blow up fuzzy guards with, no safe anti-zoning moves, some of the lowest damage in the game, no plus frames to speak of (everything off his f4 string is -5 or worse, even now ... his only actual plus frames are off st 1 and st 2, which are 10 and 12 frame highs with very little range), one projectile that started up in 37 frames, a high projectile that started up in 17 frames yet tied with cyber kano for least damaging projectiles in the game, and a 9 frame poke. He also could not make use of the option select as far as I know. These were the tools he had to compete with the likes of pre-patch Raiden, KL, Tanya, Shinnok, Liu, Cage, Erron, etc. There is no way pre-patch Reptile can be considered good relative to the nonsense in the game at the time. I would say easily bottom 10, at a time when the gap between top and bottom tiers was much wider. Milky performed amazingly well but Reptile was genuinely - dare I say - abysmal at launch.
On a different note, I've never heard Gabe get as salty as the Inferno segment - that was awesome haha.