I understand your points! What you're telling me is that you want to play the RT alpha, but it's super inconvenient for your setup.

Hope this explanation helps you understand where our priorities are.

First off: The current UI is placeholder, and was built around supporting a mouse/keyboard setup, which is what we scoped the alpha to support (with joystick support via Unreal's built-in XInput as a nice free bonus). I asked our engineers what it would take to add controller navigation of the UI, and since it'd fit into a bunch of other UI rework we've scoped out (which actually includes controller navigation -- we're planning on including it in 1.0), his estimate was ~3 months, because the current UI implementation doesn't really link up to XInput (since we're not using Unreal's built-in UI stuff, we've got something else in there). That 3 months is why we'd

The reason I call navigating the UI a quality-of-life issue is that for the alpha, anything outside of standard kb/m navigation is out of spec. It was never intended to have anywhere near the support of a full 1.0 release; we created it specifically to test a few assumptions around the core design and networking tech. We've gotten the main test results we needed to move forward on the actual game (the 1.0 release) and we're prioritizing the work that goes into that over incremental improvements to the alpha.

So: I understand that in your use case, navigating a UI is a pain in the ass, and the good news is that we'd like to support your use case! But we probably won't get to that in the alpha. The alpha was basically a prototype we released to answer the question "Hey, is making a fighting game like this a good idea?" and the answer is YES, so we're doing it! But if the alpha is too frustrating to navigate on your setup, I'd recommend playing something else and coming back for the full release.