People are talking like SF3's roster was a "huge risk" that scared people away from SF...
This is revisionist history that doesn't take the environment of SF3's release into account.
Like I said before, in the time between SF2 and SF3, LOTS of Street Fighter related games were released. And, all of those games repped the SF2 cast very well.
We had 5 versions of SF2. We had 2 versions of SFA which had lots of SF2 characters. We had SF The Movie, which had lots of SF2 characters. We had SFEX, which had lots of SF2 characters. We had the VS games which had lots of SF2 characters.
The franchise was already being run into the ground in only 6 years, with the same characters showing up over and over. Heck, when SF3 released, SFA3 was already in production...with, you guessed it, EVEN MORE SF2 characters.
All of these SF2-heavy games came out, and they weren't exactly selling like hot cakes anymore at the time. What makes you all think that if SF3 were filled with SF2 classics, it would have performed much better than those other games? SFA3 barely managed to sell a million...and that's because it was released on a popular console, the PS1 (SF3 didn't even get a true console release, so it never got a chance to sell anything).
SF3 is the popular scapegoat, but it really had little to do with the temporary disappearance of the series. The 6 year flood of pre-SF3 games did much more damage. If you were Capcom at the time, you would have shaken up the roster, too...because what else could you do? Release ANOTHER SF2-like game?