Doing some MvC2 reading today, and also listened to the recent episode of the Eventhubs podcast, where they discuss the "sins of previous SF games", to put the current popular opinion on SFV into perspective.
Opinions on these games are hilarious, it makes me laugh how hard people hate on SFV in favour of the older games. I enjoy them all personally, but it's really funny how the community hates on the new games, then as time goes on, tempers cool down and they are generally more favourably reviewed when the new game is out.
SF3 was received very poorly, and nearly killed the FGC, severely damaging it for a decade, and the game is unbalanced as fuck. Today it is viewed as a masterpiece, one of the best fighting games ever made, despite it's issues.
SF4 had it's ups and downs as well, on the Eventhubs podcast the main guy was remembering how people were trashing the game calling it boring as fuck when Marvel 3 was on the horizon, people wanted to move on from it and get something better, MvC and SFxT. Today it is constantly referenced in SFV discussions, people love to talk about how much they love playing and watching 4.
I just found this comment from an Eventuhubs MvC2 page from 2010:
I think people just like to bitch. MvC2 is busted and unbalanced as hell, yet here we are 20 years later standing on our chairs screaming fuck yes that this game has come back to shine.