Now I kind of want Stryker to get in and just be a meme lord
I feel like characters should be made for the fans of those said characters.
No matter what they do with Stryker or any manner of twenty other characters people aren't going to mess with him if they didn't mess with him before or had some inclination to like them but are on the fence.
You describe yourself as someone who likes the supernatural and over the top characters and to me MK has always been about the fusion of science/technology and magic/supernatural so I think characters like Stryker juxtaposed with Motaro, Scorpion, etc so for me I consider characters like that necessary.
People responded well to MK9 Stryker, he was lean, had the right amount of attitude/cheese and I thought his redesign was perfect. I think the "just shoots guns" narrative is unfair similarly
Also I feel like this is something people should think about: Everyone that likes Scorpion, Sub-Zero etc get their characters every single game and the reason we have diverse rosters is so that there are characters for EVERYONE.
Stryker ain't for everyone the same way Kitana or Reptile isn't for everyone, they're for unique subsets of fans.