I don't think I ever argued that. Its one of my critcisms of SFV actually, I don't think you can play a lot f characters in different ways and I see less variety of play. All karin matches look the damn same. My point was that most of the audience doesn't account or care about that, they just wanna play as ryu or ken, and they don't want to feel overwhelmed online.
That's the balance of making a fighting game roster, or lot of crossovers in general ( particularly in comics). You have to balance your interesting ideas, and things you want to animate and variant gameplay styles with the overwhelming reality of most of the audience isn't going to care about that they want to play as, popular character. And there are a lot of popular characters, so now they have balance that out.
I'm not saying gameplay isn't important. I'm not saying variant gameplay styles is important, i'm saying that to a majority of the audience , they don't care about that. Look at smash, folks playing melee still and smash 4, but even if smash is dumbed down and casual as hell, the value is sonic can punch mario and pac-man in the face for most of the audience.
All i'm saying is , decisions like that are made because they also need to consider those people. That's all I'm saying.