These topics are always just massive piles of people conflating one issue with another and trying to pass off objective answers to subjective situations.
As a complete nobody a few things i've observed-
1. The conflation of difficulty with depth is bullshit.
Yes there should probably some level of "harder to do stuff", but the line on that seems hazy at best and arbitrary execution is 100x worse than "dumbing down" on the effect it'll have on the game done wrong. SFIV isn't good because of 1 frame links. It's good IN SPITE OF 1 frame links, and is extra funny because thanks to plinking they AREN'T 1 frame links. So they made a game filled with 1 frame links and then left in some dumb button pleasuring nonsense so that anyone could do them with consistency. Just make the fucking things 2-3 frames.
Or we could talk about the holy grail of stupid execution and just add L canceling to mk. I LOVE how melee plays at a high level and i'll go to the fucking barricades saying the game would be 100% better if they just removed L canceling entirely and adjusted a few moves to account for it (I think you'd need to do barely any). SHFF combos are still going to be fucking hard and very impressive and while there's some hard core elitists who swear it just won't be as good as watching SHFFL combos they probably need a hug and a drink.
Realistically i think it's fine to want an easier game, so long as you're smoothing out the difficulty curve, not flattening it.
2. What most people actually want are real choices/risk reward.
The reason that people think difficulty = good is because it can lead to lots of options. We like options, but only if they're meaningful. Very few people like RPG's where you can get +1% stat boosts for a million granular things (and often devolve into a few builds anyways) vs ones where you might only have a few choices, but they're all massively game changing. The whole problem, for example, with variations/custom movesets with MK11 is it's just hard to balance. If the NRS team can't put the time in to really give these variations/moves a reason to exist, then at best it's casual bait. I'm sure they could probably make a 5 character, 3 variation, fighter well, but the more you add the harder it gets and dev time is absolutely a limited resource. Sooo many suggestions boil down to "well why didn't they do fucking everything" and it just flys in the face of the realities of the very complicated development cycles these things go through.
Related to this, and back to combos, i doubt many people want some arbitrary SNK pretzel motion to do 2% more damage than the easier one. We do want the ability to maybe take a harder to confer route (probably due to spacing judgement calls) for extra damage, or a spot with good potential reset setups. These things can be hard, but they don't NEED to be, and I don't really think theres anything wrong going in either direction for it.
3. Just because MK11 has done all of this badly doesn't mean it can't be done well-
To me the critical problem with MK11 is what i call "spreadsheet balance".
MK9 is all about "here's a pile of broken shit for each character, it mostly work". Cyrax will one touch you, kenshi will kill you from another zip code, sub zero will lock you in a corner and abuse you, johnny cage will put you in gross pressure and chip off half your life if you're lucky, etc. Outside of kabal being just a little too good at everything for the games health, i think it works well. Everyone (who's playable) is oozing character, and it's very similar to something like MvC2/MvC3/Melee.
Conversely, MK11's issue isn't "footsies are boring" or "KB's take out skill" or whatever. It's that everything feels so god damn similar. Almost every meterless conversion nets the same damage. Almost every metered conversion nets the same damage. Almost all zoning feels the same. It's like walking into the world largest ice cream store and finding out they have 175 flavors of barely different tasting vanilla with food dye and then the usual chocolate, strawberry, and for some reason fucking pistachio. There's some really cool moves/concepts hidden in this mess, but they don't do enough. It's like someone sat down, mathed out that "3 combos to a kill is good" and then ran a standardization algo over everyone to make sure no one does anything "too unfair".
SFV suffered HARD from this, and arguably still does, but fuck at least I can pick bison and bully people in the corner with by looping + strings and chipping off half their health. If i tried putting him in MK11 i'd probably be walked into a therapy session with the designers and asked to talk about my hostile feelings becuase this game feels like someone put speed limits and stop lights in a rally race. There is something really cool here but some weird fear of how that'd work out has led to it getting in it's own fucking way over and over again. And for the record I think Samurai Showdown V SP is one of treasures of fighting games so i'm pretty sure it's not the footsies turning me off.
4. Competitive is just marketing but it's important marketing.
At the end of the day the only reason any company gives a damn about competitive is because it can drive sales for a game that's 3 years old when some clip goes viral or it becomes a cult classic (and often drive sales of the NEXT game). With the advent of DLC this has become even more important, but it was always about "oh shit people buy more games if they're well made.". It's an niche genre, but yes you have to design for both the casuals and the comp players. Melee is still THE smash game because like all smash games it's inherently easy for a beginner to feel like they're actually doing something, but it also allows for a whole bunch of crazy bullshit at the highest level (which again i think L canceling could be ripped out and it'd still be fine).
Unfortunately it's a lot easier to spreadsheet balance than it is to get really good asymmetric balance, so the comp players suffer and so does the comp scene.
Further casuals know that "play 8 random fights" is a trash mode for them too, but don't care enough to not buy a game over it, so they're not getting anything better either.
NRS has been really smart here by actually fleshing out shit that casuals do care about. It's crazy that MKX was the first game i can think of that had unique, voice acted/animated, pre fight lines. It's a lot of work to do, but it's decently simple (no crazy coding going on), and yet we STILL have generic text on the screen bullshit on so many other games. That + a main game plot that huffs slightly less paint than it's competitors (which is a shame because mk9 was legit) is doing a LOT of the legwork, along with the classic draw of "see all the fatalities".
Oh and mostly unrelated but guest characters aren't going away, deal with. If Spawn, Robocop, Joker, and Rambo don't boost DLC sales, then whatever whatever character you've got plastered all over you walls (it's mileena isn't it) certainly isn't making it in because they're going to stop making dlc after that one. They aren't "taking their spot", they're literally making it possible to add more because there's a hell of a lot more joker wannabe's who'll shell out cash to watch him be edgy in this game than thirsty mileena/rain/tremor/mokap fans.
As for strive (since it's going to be topical)-
First, no it's not as deep as previous GG's, but it doesn't help people ALWAYS compare the last iteration of a series to a brand new one. Who here is just dying for a good round of some Vanilla SF4? That's what everyone's talking about when they mean SFIV was better than SFV right? 70% AA sagat conversions? Of course not. Fuck ST is the OG "well why is this better than all the new stuff" and it's the fucking 5th version of that game.
I think it's mostly made some brilliant decisions (RC system is the best yet, wall breaks are a neat way to solve the corner problem, potentially high damage is great when so many games are trying to make everything do 30%, still full of oppressive gg bs), but is dealing with growing pains (meter gain might need to be higher, it's TOO easy to convert every touch to a wall break for most of the cast, ditto on damage, some of the oppressive bs right now is just boring).
They've been smart to not overreact and knee jerk patch. This lets them launch their first DLC character (so they can see what his issues are as well)
and tweak on relevant data/feedback not just week one twitter storms. The future of the game may depend a lot on what these first patches show their priorities to be, but all the parts are there and I think they're on track to make another classic. Nerf a some damage/combo routes, boost the meter gain, and fucking go for it. A game where I-No can blue burst to slow the block recovery frames of her opponent so she can fuzzy guard them doesn't sound "too shallow" to me.
Oh and most importantly, it's a AAA fighting game with good visuals, decently easy execution to get the basics, and competent netcode. It's selling well with a menu screen that's longer than a boss fight. That should tell you a lot about what does and doesn't matter and also makes it impossible to compare to previous games because rollback is just that important. I don't think the game does nearly as well if they make it as hard as some of the older games (fuck FRC's) , but just having decent netcode and their usual glorious presentation is pulling so much weight.
