I know in general older fighting game fans like me (who has followed the competitive community for years) generally feel dumb characters are dumb characters. However about 3 or 4 years back I was at a tournament that also had a smash tournament available. I remember the smash players banning chain throwing (now I don’t know what this is), but their main excuse was that the move was “too easy to do”. He even told me he could show me (a non-smash player) how to do it in 5 minutes. Another player talked about another powerful technique in the game (don’t remember what it was called), but the original guy said that’s fine because it’s harder to do. I figured that’s probably just a common mentality amongst smash players.
However I’ve noticed in the more mainstream community this attitude has been adopted. Eddie is probably one of the dumbest characters in Accent Core, but people really don’t scrutinize him because he’s easy to use. Now I know more competitive players may still think he’s stupid, but I remember when I use to watch Ogawa matches on Youtube, and players praised him. I would go to another youtube video with 3S Chun, and people would scorn her. So it seems like to some degree, people love some top tiers over the other.
More recently in the MVC2 vs MVC3 debates people seem to have Dark Phoenix and Wolverine (talking about vanilla), but talk about how greatly technical MVC2 was. In genreal when people talk about technical MVC2, they’re usually referring to Magneto. Now MVC2 was a game I played quasi competitively for a good amount of years, and Magneto was about as stupid or more stupid that Wolverine/Phoenix. He was a broken overpowered character who most people would admit has a massive luck factor. However he also gets a pass because he does require execution.
Does or should execution barriers make a difference when a character is broken and poorly designed?