You appear to be wrong here. They keep adjusting Kitana’s specials in both Fan-Fare and Fearless to little to no effect, why? Because of her normals. You mention both Cage and Cetrion as examples of characters without fast mids that have specials that make up for this, and while that is accurate, the normals they do have are quite good.
Cage has an impressive stagger game and jailing low pokes that lead into plus frames, Cetrion has normals that leave her at advantage on block along with others that, even while negative, stagger you so far back you are still forced to play her game or risk getting hit by her extended hitboxes.
The issue is, as far as Fan-Fare and Fearless are concerned, it is simply far too easy for Kitana to lose her turn. Highborn bypasses this to an extent, allowing for razor mixups and stance cancels to cover her otherwise unthreatening normals, thus, putting it far above the other two when combined with her zoning.
Kitana’s 12d2 string is borderline useless outside of punishes and is one of the only things she can jail a low poke into. B142/B131 are great strings, but can be blown up quite easily outside of Highborn. Her movement is far too sluggish for her to easily step out of the range of, or backdash out of, a lot of things in this game, and she lacks any plus frames to enforce a guessing game on her opponent.
Until they review her normals and/or movement Kitana will always falter underneath characters like Cage and Cetrion. Depending on what they do, a rework of razors may be in order to see that she doesn’t become too crazy.