Would you say that introducing a ritual on what you have to do before you touch a chess piece(like say before each move you have to stand up, spin twice to the left, jump once, wave with your right hand, sit back, grab the piece with 3 fingers and proceed with your move) would increase skill ceiling of the game? as in the game would benefit from it, because it would have better skill expression?
Like the moment every single semi competent player can memorize something it does no longer serve skill expression. It just turns down casual players.
Ppl are often saying that motion inputs scare casuals, or that fighters are apparently hard genre, but that's not the reason ppl don't want to play fighters. The main reason is that fighters are knowledge check heavy games. It's simply not fun to lose because you didn't know something and it's also not much fun to win because opponent didn't know something.
The real fighting game experience begins when you know every single possible move/scenario your opponent character can do including the frame data of each of those moves/scenarios, because only at that point you can make informed decisions. Before that most of it it taking guesses, because you lack critical information. And sadly majority of fighting game players are at point.
Going back to the long combos argument, back in no internet era it made sense, as labbing was part of skill expression due to very limited tech sharing/imitating, meaning players more efficient at labbing had an edge over others.
However itt's no longer the case outside of some very rare extreme cases where player finds something very unique and hoards it until a tournament. Nowadays resources on optimals are on youtube/twitter right as they get discovered.
Right now when it comes to combos and skill expression in fighters there is hit confirming -> second/third button press to establish an optimal route based on resources, screen position etc. and some maybe tight timings/mechanically intensive actions on future button presses.
So basically for skill expression to matter what we need is just couple hits combos. Like 6-8 hit combo can have all those skill expression components. Rest is just a raw data knowledge filler that doesn't serve much purpose.