It's fun for what it is, but it will never become something as intense or as deep as stuff shown during the top 8's at evo yesterday, because having motions for attacks let's the devs expand move sets and give value to said moves based on execution required.
Like let's take Ragna the Bloodedge from BlazBlue the main character and one of the most basic in the game. Counting everythng he can do as an attack (normals, specials, supers)
He has 42 attacks
This is from a 4 button game
Exactly, it's crazy to see special motions called antiquated when they're actually very elegant, and allow for more moves overall, and more precise control over those moves.
Let's say you have a 4-button game. If you stick to special motions, you can assign several different specials per button using traditional 2D inputs.
But if you want to use simple directional inputs for special moves, you have to either give up command normals on the 4 buttons, dedicate one of the 4 buttons to special moves instead, or add an entire extra button for specials. These are all pretty big trade-offs/considerations from a design standpoint when it comes to the overall game.
With a dedicated special move button and simplified inputs, you can get 5 specials only (4 buttons + neutral), without variations on each individual move.
Using 2D motions easily lets you have more than 5 special moves with way more options to assign them. Even sticking only to QCF and QCB inputs for each of the 4 buttons leaves you at 8 specials, while still allowing command normals on all 4 buttons.
Add in DP, command grab, charge, and super motions and you have a huge amount of potential inputs for each character, which allows for lots of depth and character possibilities. You can do lots of really useful, neat, and logical things like assign kick-based specials to the normal kick buttons, for example. Or having different variations of a QCF move mapped to different buttons. QCF + punch for a horizontal projectile, QCF + kick for an angled projectile. Or fire/ice, or fast/slow, or pretty much whatever options and abilities you want any character to have. (Same considerations also apply in Smash, with B specials broadly suiting their directional inputs, with up+B moves generally travelling vertically , side-B moves horizonally, etc.)
Traditional inputs do their job incredibly well. It's pretty sad seeing actually good design get criticized by people who don't even try to understand it.