Well we already know we're living in the darkest timeline. But taking this as a much needed upgrade to Marvel 3 it's a little easier to take. It certainly wouldn't fly as Marvel 4. It does play well, at least. Every time I play the demo it makes me hungry for more.
idk about an upgrade, man. like, i still can't believe you can't cancel backdash into forward dash and vice versa. getting rid of that on purpose is so antithetical to marvel style gameplay. i really can't grasp what the end goal is for removing real movement from the game besides lowering the skill ceiling
also going from LMHS to punch/kick in terms of just gettin' used to the control scheme wasn't too rough for me when i was tryin' the game out. it takes a few games to get the muscle memory to skip straight to heavies off optimal shit but in terms of just cranking out a magic series you have some more leeway because you can do the full ground series (lplkhphk cr.hp) rather than doing 3 normals into launch.
one annoying thing will be notation because typing out 'lplkhphk' or 'magic series' every time is going to be annoying as shit vs. lmhs, haha
the 'LK' button in MvCi functions as a medium in nearly all cases anyway. ESPECIALLY the low LKs. They are not chainable and doing an empty jump low will have the speed of a crouch medium (a few frames slower).
idk, maybe it's cuz i was playing nova and iron man but the diff. between their LK and their old mediums was pretty drastic. iron man's cr.HK being his old medium with less reach and nova's slide being a command normal probably ties into that as well.
like, dashing around pressing cr.LK or st.LK vs. cr.M/st.M doesn't really seem the same in terms of reach? i was seeing the same across the board for most of the chars i was interested as well, especially on chars with really prominent mediums like dante and ryu.
also for the last part are you saying that doing a crouching LK in landing frames adds startup to it? i really, really hope that's not what you mean