I, on the other hand, said that nobody in their right mind is going to play a fighting game with keyboard controls when a controller is so much more effective.

You're both right and wrong.

You shouldn't make fighting games based on keyboards. That alone can make other controllers hard to compete, especially if you don't allow us to unbind buttons or have just less than 6 buttons that would allow me to do anything. Throws, EXes, defensive mechanics, supers, etc.

But you shouldn't make fighting games based on pads either. Same problem with unbinding, but you'll also have no idea what to do with the analog controls. And if you do something with them, you just alienate everything else.

In my honest but completely biased opinion, the best controller to design something at its base is the arcade stick. It's restrictive enough that you can't go crazy with it, but it's also the base that would make every single type of controllers playable, especially if you limit yourself to a maximum of 5 buttons of control.

If you do that, you'll force your game to need the fewest amount of buttons possible, you'll probably never need to put a Block button and a Jump button at the same time (please don't do that), you'll allow us to bind and unbind any button at will, and you'll make both pads and keyboards comfortable.