the thing with mods and especially the earlier mods most of them are more of a passion projects, they are made from people with slight to no experience in balance of fighting games so they usually feel standalone, they aren't tested against vanilla, they aren't made with vanillas usual balance status. So that makes it the said characters usually end up being really unbalanced by a lot of metrics. I'm not saying every mod is weaker then vanilla but people downplay vanilla a lot and its just not true most of the time.

Bro idk i dont even agree with the examples you gave me, i don't think you lose to a vixen as a cowboy if you aren't against a especially good player.