It's deliberate and a design choice. Your regular jump has a lot of quick invincibility at the start, while your roll has much longer invincibility frames. The jump carries you vertically but doesn't have much horizontal clearance without air hike, so you can't just hop out of trouble whenever you feel like it. You have to time your jumps and be calculated.
A lot of this has been thrown out the window with Vergil, who breaks the rules a little too much if you ask me, but there's a reason for the above limitation. The dodging isn't hard. You just have to time it. It's a feature, not a flaw.
Yeah. I mean, part of that is why I wouldn't necessarily advise people to get used to relying solely on jumping for dodging, though, even though I understand how useful that is for new players.
Another major thing that balances the jump is that (outside of Air Hike/Sky Star, whose use is fairly limited outside of DT) you have basically no way to get further invincibility frames once you're already in the air. An already airborne character is way more vulnerable (though obviously there are some attacks you have to dodge by getting airborne and staying there for a while).
I'd be down for the dodge input becoming simpler than R1+direction+X, though. DmC's two dodge buttons were very silly, and I think it's important for dodging to retain some required directionality to it rather than just functioning Bayonetta-style (though obviously Vergil can use Trick to accomplish some similar stuff with much more precise and less generous timing). But I do think that the games do an insufficient job of teaching the player side dodging with proper incentives even though they're really good at teaching a lot of other lessons, and I think dodging is a really important technique that is also a good bit trickier to learn, input-wise, than just pulling off attacks. I admit that I can't come up with a working replacement scheme that *isn't* a dedicated dodge button, though.
Perhaps a better solution would lie in incentives (beyond just the i-frames); DMC1 had the fairly cool Rolling Blaze thing to enhance your jump when you have Ifrit equipped, and DMC4SE Lady can deal damage with her double jump, but DMC has never made a roll dodge more than just a roll dodge. I'd be down for more things like Table Hopper - you could have Trish's dodge create an electricity trap if she does it with perfect timing, or even (gulp!) have it temporarily activate Quicksilver with perfect timing. Regardless, I think the test of mid-tier skill in DMC should be about your ability to read a situation (including enemy placements, enemy telegraphs, enemy health, and enemy vulnerabilities) and react accordingly, and less about your ability to handle a ton of inputs (which I see as more of a high-end thing). But on top of that, as I've argued elsewhere, the more stuff you can cram into marginally simpler controls, the more you can make the more complex higher-end stuff even more rewarding (which is why, for example, Dante should always have gun-charging turned on, not just when he's in Gunslinger, and which is why a lot of his Style-specific inputs should be turned into forward/backward+shoot inputs or two-face-button inputs).
Also, as much as people are reporting that Trish feels like the hardest character to do truly stylish and impressive stuff with, I've got to say that she looks way better in videos than Lady does. Lady does not look that exciting
at all in videos even though she's a good deal of fun to actually play with. I reiterate my wish that Lady were all about ultra-high mobility. One fun thing I can think of that'd work kinda well: giving each of her guns a different double-jump move (instead of just the Kalina Ann one), and then letting them all count as a *different* double jump (so that with some weapon swapping in quick succession, you could actually quadruple jump with a rocket jump, Rainstorm, and some kind of downward shotgun blast). It'd be a nice callback to her acrobaticism in DMC3 to have stuff like that. I do understand, though, that locking her in place a lot of the time is pretty important in order to make her not totally overpower the DMC4 enemies, who mostly aren't designed to handle a theoretical character who could just keep dancing around outside of their range while hammering them with attacks from afar. I'm hoping DMC5 is a good opportunity for her character to shine (as a high-mobility version of her would require enemies that are better at teaming up and better at chasing you down quickly).
