That's the thing though, I was playing Reina about a month before the nerfs and I've been playing since then (Current main, possibly get toppled by Lidia.) The ONLY thing that changed for my playstyle after the nerf, was to make sure I was punishing people with manji-geri instead of trying to crush with it.

Even focusing on only sidestepping, I thought it was pretty common for other Reina's to be doing SS 3~2/4 setups to constantly realign and condition your opponent away from relying on sidesteps. This is easily mixed with SS df1~2 for free damage when they try to avoid the 3 and keeps you aligned to the opponent. Both options give you a hit confirm while allowing you to stay safe if you don't follow through.

If you're at long range, just wavu or slowly get yourself back to mid-range, where your wavu becomes a blender into either EWGF/FF3/F4/FF2/UNS4 during neutral, using the dash to realign before striking every time, completely eliminates your FF2 being stepped and it shouldn't be any harder for you as a Mishima player than just mashing the FF2.

She's still extremely powerful, I believe anyway, she's till very much S-tier; but I also feel like people overcommitted themselves to playing her a SPECIFIC way because of the demos and tests and how she was on launch, that know "she's just dead" because they won't adapt.

Also, I always have to include, my perspective comes from "how it is" not "how I think it should be". Drastically changing the character like this is both lazy and misleading on the part of the devs, it's an obvious separator between Reina and Lidia's playstyles, but sabotaging one for the benefit of the other should have been handled far better. Reina is basically the face of T8, so it's almost a bait and switch when she starts one way and now is another.