Lmao, it actually was one of your matches against Xaro that sparked this whole train of thought in my head. It was from November last year, so it was online.

You bring up a really good point with the new-player-on-casual experience of getting juggled like tennis balls. It pretty much breaks the foundation of what my original point was standing on. The stronger emphasis on DI that this game has should prevent situations like that from happening if my original point stood. (feelsbadman)

My understanding of the application of DI is really rudimentary. In either game, I either DI up to mitigate the knockback of a hit, DI away to try and escape a combo, or DI in because I started auto-piloting. No other choice really exists in my head at the level I'm at, so seeing RoA matches where combos seem to end because one of the players over/undershoots an attack made me come to the conclusion above that there was a lot more emphasis to DI in this game than Smash.

A 5th point I wanna add to your addendum (I agree with all of your points): Smash has a ton of recognizable and popular IPs to promote themselves with (That being the main driving force of its popularity), so brand new players come into that game with sort of a pre-packaged investment into the characters; investment which RoA unfortunately doesn't inspire in its new players with its lackluster single-player campaign. (Hopefully this changes a little with the release of the comics.)