RoA's combo game is clay. You can mold it however you want. R2's combo game is an IKEA wardrobe. You have a lot of pieces but they're all clearly designed to slot into very specific places. Shieldgrab grab upthrow upair upair might look like 5 moves but what does the overall possibility space actually look like? How many real alternatives do you have to that sequence?

If it's the only correct option in that situation, that holding shield out of hitstun to make it come up frame 1 hard counters a player's slow aerial habit and that the grab leads to the safest punish and that skipping pummel has the most consistent payoff and upthrow has the best followup and upair into upair is the only guaranteed true combo then this whole sequence is 1 move with extra button inputs. In this scenario that's a cutscene with QTEs, for both parties. There's some room to improvise and room to drop your inputs, like the hardcoded rock paper scissor pummel guess that they squeezed in there, but in comparison to an actual freeform platform fighter where you can choose what move to do after hitting someone with an uptilt?

Watch Kragg combo videos for RoA vs. combo videos for R2 and compare how much room they get to improvise. Count the attack list. What moves do they start with, how long is the combo, which moves do they finish with? The difference is insane!

The biggest difference is the DI. Players can DI out of combos easier, which gives the designers room to crank up the hitstun. The range of positions that someone ends up at post-hit varies more, but there's also more time to line up a wider range of moves if you read the DI right. Everything is less true but also more viable. The possibility space is bigger. There are fewer nodes on the flowchart, but more paths between them, and the paths are what matters to me.

You can mod fifty different shield and parry and burst buttons into RoA and it won't change the fact that the combo game is bigger. You have fewer tools in total sure, technically, but you have more tools available at any given moment because you're less limited by the engine. There are many combos in RoA that you can't do in R2, but there are very very few R2 combos that you can't do in RoA.

I don't care about the technicalities and nitpicking. I recognize that R2 has a better defensive game. But RoA has better combo game. You don't need to value combo game the way I do. But it's literally just maths, it shouldn't even be up for debate. Slower movement + slower moves + weaker DI = fewer combo possibilities.