community bias stems from history, plain and simple
there has always been huuuuuuuuge west coast bias in capcom scene, easily worse than anything on this site. that's because CA was one of the only places that kept SF alive in the 90s while it had died down in the rest of the US - even NY didn't really get serious about SF until eddie lee & arturo came along. so they were the ones who ran the first majors and founded SRK & evo, and it was their opinions that shaped the scene.
back in the day, if west coast didn't play your game that meant it was ass. and if EC was actually better than WC in a game both played (see: marvel 2), that meant the game wasnt as serious and EC still couldnt win in the REALEST shit.
then you look at MK scene. who was really taking MK seriously back in the 90s? east coast & chicago! so they occupy the same spot that west coast heads do in capcom community, thus it shouldn't be a surprise to see a lot of the same patterns from the other end...
also i kinda agree with jonnitti re: complaining about pools. this community badly, BAAAAADLY needs to check out some of the original SRK articles (talking like 2000-2001 here, not sure if they're still around) on different tournament formats. the SF scene used to be very similar to this one in terms of caring about exact tournament placings...so the cannons went into great detail explaining the limitations of double elimination. in a nutshell, here's the deal:
even *in theory*, due to randomized brackets and evenly-matched players and short sets, double elimination can only accurately determine the TOP TWO players in a given tournament. THAT'S IT. and in reality that's often not even the case, since top players may match up differently against various players of a similar overall skill level. there is inherently some luck to ALL placings below top 2 in double-elim, at minimum.
this is why "if you didn't get top 3 then who the fuck are you?" became the mantra of the SF scene at that time. it's a lot more complicated nowadays since the pool of top players is far deeper...but i don't think making Top 8 the new brass ring is the best answer. instead, i would argue that we should value consistency and beating top players above any particular placing. japan learned this stuff forever ago since all their tournaments are single-elim, but double-elim seems to have fooled us even though it's not as much better as we think...
