Because the culture of the community is, at the moment, is stuck in a cycle that is hardly conducive to a long, healthy lifespan.
Some complaints I hear, ones that would take a normal title 2-3 years to cultivate, happen at an excessively hurried pace in the NRS scene. Literally people in this thread talking about how it was a one or two character game for too long (it never was, but I digress), when those characters existed in that state for literally 3 months. Three. Months. Granted that in that time, quite a few major tournaments happened, but the worst of the balance was cut down in three months, with ample time given to let the community see if they could find alternatives. Older NRS titles had twice as much time for those problems to get solved, so the complaint gets less and less legitimate every title.
Developers can have clear intentions and a swift hand to correct any errors, but it is ultimately up to the players to push a game's meta or challenge the status-quo, and I think the NRS scene is really poor at this. In ever competitive title they've released, the same arguments ("You need a team of characters!" "We need one last patch!" "[Insert character] runs the game!") are made, and they are almost always dead wrong, yet no one seems to be wise to the cycle. Instead, the newest fad always takes over, which leads to intense stagnation in results because, shocker, the people actually doing the work to be good and push their character(s) to the limit win out over the guys loudly proclaiming the balance is shit and confirm their own biases with gimmick picks that rarely work.
I think one of the problems is that because of the stagnation I mentioned, there's no pressure to evolve. A lot of people will see "pressure" and think I'm discounting things like IPS and E-League, but I most certainly am not talking about the pressure of placing to earn money or points for a tournament series. What I'm talking about is the pressure of having a strategy stop working, so you're forced to adapt or die. In many games, this tug-of-war usually creates deep dives into a game's engine to find things like option-selects, really deep matchup quirks, and so-on. People like UltraDavid have already done this, and they're not active players! I hesitate to call it laziness, because that may be too harsh, but when the narrative becomes "The smartest thing to do is pick another character," that leads to people ceasing to explore the game because that narrative becomes true.
The community's size has a lot to do with it, too. There are not a whole lot of players, and even then, the amount of people that seem truly interested in breaking it down as a fighting game seems even lower. There's a large amount of fair-weather fans (like OP) who play it pretty casually, see the arguments thrown out by the elite of the community, and then use that to confirm their biases and push the idea that the game is shallow, counter-pick heavy, etc. When the majority of a very small base has no interest in pushing the game to its limits, what hope is there for anyone interested in playing it who's not deeply invested in the scene?
I have zero problems admitting that Injustice is not a popular game; the first one wasn't, so I don't expect the sequel, which is almost identical, to be either. What I did expect was for the community to not do what they did to every game that came before it, which was embrace the most shallow aspects of a game, proclaim that as the status-quo, and move on after about a year and a half, leaving only the strictest die-hards. People can deny this happened all they want, but I was there and I saw it happen, and I'm watching it happen again. It sucks, it really does.
