Personally, from someone who played 3s and 4 for ages, Street Fighter 5 made me quit playing the series, mainly due to the heavily simplified gameplay. In an effort to hook the casual players in Capcom went haywire and removed almost anything hard and interesting except 1-hit confirms. They added a 3 frame buffer to everything, virtually trivializing every combo in the game and removing any layer of strategy from it. They removed close proximity normals for whatever reason. They shortened hitboxes on normals so that characters that play a reactive footsie game with range are practically non-existent. They added extra input lag that makes it harder to react to and whiffpunish stuff, this in combination with the stubby normals makes it a slugfest where players take turns frametrapping each other. All this comes together to create an aggressive game where any attempt to play any other way is punished.
I'll paste an entry I made in a different thread:
I've played fighting games all my life, played the shit out of every iteration of Street Fighter 4 and was one of the top players in my country for the games lifespan, and I uninstalled SF5 after maybe twenty hours. I did this due to a number of reasons, some of them being the streamlining of characters where every single one practically has the same gameplan, the 3 frame execution buffer which to me ruins the game since it severely oversimplifies things, the stubby normals that makes most exchanges take place with the characters right next to each other, and the input lag.
I'd like to talk about the aversion to execution barriers that many people in this thread seem to have, and the notion that skill should only exist as mind games and not on a technical level. I call bullshit. The biggest part of fighting games are about outsmarting your opponent, true, but execution plays an important role too. Take for example a move that is -4 on block. Without an input buffer the risk of throwing this move out is not that great since punishing it requires 1 frame timing, and unless someone is looking for it punishing it on reaction is hard. With an input buffer punishing this suddenly becomes super easy, essentially making every move that is -3 or -4 on block an automatic punish. It removes depth from the game.
The same goes for difficult combos. I see nothing wrong with a player having to choose between the easier option that gives less damage/positioning, or the harder one that could close out the round but if missed leads to a massive punish. It teaches players to know when to take risks, and to know when to step back and choose the safer option. If you whiff a DP in front of me I can choose to do the hard 1f-link FADC combo to put you in the corner, giving me a bigger chance to end the round. I can also go for a damaging, easy combo since I don't want to risk getting punished or failing and barely hitting you for any damage at all. Calculated risks on more levels is not a bad thing. Once again making links and combos easy removes the depth of having to choose.
Most characters in games that have harder execution doesn't require harder execution combos. It's there for those that put in the extra time and effort to learn it. If you want to be a boxer you need to hit the gym, if you want to be good at online shooters you need to practice your aiming. If you want to be the good at fighting games you need to hit training mode and learn the technicalities.
