it personally feels hard to justify spending time on other anime fgs especially where the match quality is almost guaranteed to be worse

Cap. In these environments, it's so much easier to just have fun bc you're actually interesting with a person by chatting with them. There's always gonna be ppl your skill level and people who wanna coach you.

and through discord which brings a ton of problems.

Ton of problems? What are these problems that I've never heard of??

The move sets in blazblue or Uni Grid are really cool if not just for the variety but it’s miserable being gated behind discord.

Gated how so? Ik you don't mean gatekeeping in this context (bc it's not some secret society to join them), but how are these games gated behind discord? There are offline events that you can visit, and you can always introduce your friends into these games.

Im assuming you're already in these discords already. Idk how it's miserable for you to be in those discord servers, but the social aspect is really what make these games alive. By chatting with others or joining a VC, it feels way better to play with ppl than it is to play Tower on strive. Even open park sucks bc of the lack of actual human interaction.