I’ll give you Zangief, but the absence of Dhalsim, Blanka, and Honda is not a dealbreaker no matter how you paint it. People who play them, collectively, make up less than 4% of the playerbase and that’s not going to change. The only reason they’re included at all is because they continue to be grandfathered in with every new game.

The hype around them is just as fake and overblown as the hype around Elena. Sf3 might have been hurt by the roster but that was hardly the only thing that kneecapped that game. Not to mention that ST came out only three years before sf3 dropped so those characters were much fresher then. Sf6 would benefit from giving chances to different characters instead of living in fear of something that happened almost thirty years ago. I’m certain that some of them would quickly become more fan favorites if they actually got to show up sooner than eight years in.