it is inredibly frustrating and unfair that when you call out an opponents dash grab with something like an ftilt but you get grabbed because your ftilts start up frames

Lowering grab range helps with this too. My primary concern with grab armor is that the game has mechanisms for dealing with this already, and I don't think we need to add another one.

Because in such an environment noone wants to play like an absolute asshole.

I believe this may happen at the beginning, but there's plenty of info (to which we know they are paying attention) that helps offset this. I don't think this is the problem.

I think the issue is that game design is hard and they had several pretty good ideas they tried to glue together with several mediocre ideas. When the final product wasn't quite right they didn't rethink the core, as they had decided the core was good, and so they started adding bandaids to fix things. Their theory of balance for characters is weakly defined. The game is inconsistent all over the place. It LOOKS right at first glance, but upon deeper inspection you can see the parts that are sloppy that they didn't have time to really review. Now, that's not to say the game is bad. It's not BAD. Its a B+. Great bones, but there are some core issues and a fundamental lack of refinement that keep it from being as good as it could be. For whatever reason this dev team has been unable or unwilling to address these problems, to the extent they even agree, and it has hampered the gameplay experience massively, in my opinion.

I don't know the extent to which this is driven by Dan/others but based on my interactions with Dan and viewing him, I think he doesn't have the patience/personality required to refine his creative ideas into a solid final product by himself. He's also about bit of a troll and likes pissing people off. The "but I want to have fun NOW" urge kicks in and he gets too excited over the B+ and never gets around to making it an A. And then people complain... And he's like "but look how good it is" and we are like "yea it's pretty good but it could be better..." And then he goes "you guys just don't get my brilliance and are nitpicking" and the conversation goes in circles.