This is the thing that people don’t seem to get about custom variations. They keep comparing to MvC2 and MvC3, but those are two of the more broken and unbalanced fighting games we’ve had in the FGC.
If people can’t handle Erron and Geras they’re definitely not Marvel players to begin with.
But more importantly, you’re exactly right — it’d be super open and fun until people learned what the strongest combinations are. Then people will switch to just playing the most broken combinations of moves and that’ll become the new S tier. And we’ll also be hearing tons of complaints about how certain moves are useless or not good enough, others are OP. This is just what competitive players do — find the best stuff and abuse it.
I mean, mvc2 is certainly broken and got lucky to have a viable meta, but mvc3 was designed with all that in mind and is a pretty great game. You CAN handle things like that, but again MvC has a pretty small number of variables.
It's a cast of 36ish, with 3 possible variants per character that affects ONE thing, and those mostly fall into one class or another (beam, AA, combo extender, etc) so you can design around that. Further there's one very distinct way to affect that one thing (how long they're vulnerable during an assist call) so the game really isn't "Broken", if anything its heatlhy. It's got a decently large viable cast and bunch of ways to play. Yeah characters get to do nuts shit, butt you stand a chance with a large majority of the cast.
In comparison I don't just think that MK 11 will have a bunch of wacky shit (that's fine, plenty of games pull that off), but will just straight break in it's current state if you open the flood gates. I know someone said "well we'd know", but would we really? How many people are labbing out and testing all the bullshit you can do with misery blade/ice trap/whatever, and testing how those matchups go?
It'll be done eventually (somewhere right now someone like desk is breaking something I'm sure), but there's hardly as much incentive for the kind of people who WILL lab shit out because it's not going to make them win more. You open those flood gates and you'll see a lot more focus on figuring out what's busted, and I doubt NRS has planned for that.
And for the record they COULD do it. I do believe it's possible. Hell it may actually be their endgame where they decided that this will do for now while they take the data they get and the extra time to work on smoothing it out so it's not a train wreck, but it's a HUGE fucking project that probably starts with a lot more cost 2/3 specials to narrow down variables and interactions and may not lead to that many move viable variations (just more people getting to play what they want in ranked if they're ok losing with it).
