Your first paragraph is my issue, I think. Sticking with the Chun example, my most reliable anti-air (in most situations) seems to be st.LK which does 40 damage. You can go for dash under shenanigans and possibly reap a greater reward than the raw damage, but all you're guaranteed is the 40. On the other hand, a successful jump in into a proper full combo yields the opponent 300+ damage and put you one bad guess away from combo into stun in possibly GGs. If you anti-air somebody 80% of the time, the math is still in favor of jumping around like a nut. You have to be really consistent with anti-airing in order to truly force your opponent to play a more grounded game.
I mean, I play xrd and I still love marvel 3 and play it constantly to this day. Both of those games have an uncomfortably high chance of ending because you got outplayed just a single time or you made just one small mistake- it's one of my biggest issues with both games. That being said, the sequence of events that lead up to that hit feel more calculated/less random than in SFV. Of course, doing random crazy stuff exists xrd and marvel (nobody can deny that!). Example: Doom is in the air, has already used his airdash, and they does not have x-factor, but they do YOLO footdive and you get hit because you really didn't expect them to bet the match on it. In xrd, Sol does 99 second grand viper in round 2 w/o burst or any meter. These things can and do work sometimes in practically any fighting game ever. SFV just feels like it has more of those moments, relatively speaking.
Still, Final round is going to be an absolute blast if SonicFox is going to enter the SFV tournament. I want to see what the young prodigy can do in a stacked player pool, especially against legends such as Infiltration or Daigo (or the other top international players).
