Honestly, I'd go for fewer characters that are well thought out and expansive instead of as many as they can cram into the game and have them be shallow. Less is more.
It's a product not an art piece. If you're on this forum, congrats, you are in the vast minority of MK players. If you want super deep characters with no guests, great. That's an indie project. Not a multi million AAA budget "spent 6 months on violent graphics alone" spectacle.
To be clear, I would personally love the exact same thing. More focus on MK characters, actually fleshing out the bones of the half decent plot the world has (which is practically shakespear by fighting game lore standards), and spending more time finding ways to focus on these things. Hell it has always bugged me that in a game with about 30 ways to brutally murder someone they never even tried to figure out a way to make that work in the singleplayer. Everyone just magically surrvives death tournament after death tournament
That said, it is never going to happen. As much as people want to be upset this is becoming fortnight or whatever, that's what moves units. You want whatever character that didn't make it in the roster in some DLC? Well then you're getting at least 1 guest character for every 3 non guest characters because that's what gets people to buy and fund this. If every single person on this forum paid $100 for a copy to keep guest characters out it wouldn't cover the sprite work on Liu's boots.
If anything, be glad this CAN'T be nearly as bad as fortnight simply because of the violence. They're never going to put mickey mouse or ryu or whatever in MK simply because they don't want them getting their head ripped off, so you at least get thematically appropriate characters by design. They'd absolutely shove in Marvel or whatever characters if they could, but since they can't we at least get stuff like spawn.
