I'm kind of terrified that so many people are praising SCV's gameplay as it feels like the antithesis of everything I enjoyed about the series.
For me, soul calibur has always been about outwitting your opponent and reading them rather than brain-dead damage conversion. Most of the combos were about setting your opponent up (you'd expect the first few hits to be blocked or miss and catch them at a branching point or even just stop the combo early and deviate to catch them off guard once you've conditioned them.)
In SCV it felt more like the usual dial-a-combo nonsense from fighters I've lost interest in where your opponent basically has to just sit back and wait until you're done playing your private session of DDR on their health bar. This was further pushed by the nerfs to 8-way run and heck, it even feels like your influence on direction after a hit has been reduced where in the original SC you could float yourself out of people's whirling attacks fairly quickly if they didn't anticipate it properly.
For me, I feel that if we'd gotten the arcade updates on home console then SC3 would've easily been my top entry in the series as while it had some combo-ish-ness it was still not the flashy extended stuff you see in SCV and was super content rich. While I always appreciate the experimental stuff they try in each version I would love to see armour breaking either changed or gone as I'd rather see my armour damaged instead of vanishing completely leaving most CaS fighting in their undies and generally making some of the normal cast look a little underdressed too.
I don't intrinsically have an issue with them experimenting with meter management but the fact it usually lends itself to combo extension is a no-no to me. If people want long combos there's plenty of games already out there to scratch that itch so I feel they'd be better off catering to a less saturated market like... I dunno... the people who have actually been playing the series the whole time and like it for what it is rather than trying to be an SF4 rip-off?