As a huge Dolls fan, I was in awe the entire last half of the story. OMG. So many neat touches. First of all Santamu is Vietnamese, not African. Also, I loved how they all had unique attacks based on A SINGLE FREAKING 18 YEARS OLD ARTWORK. Enero had the megaphone (okay, it was a mic originally), Fevrier had a gun, etc. I'd pay money to be able to play as them all, even if they're just Cammy clones with one more move (that's what Juli was originally, after all). Or make Decapre a value-added character where she comes with all the others as alts.
Necalli did have a purpose. He was there to provoke Ryu into finding a way to the True Hadou. If Akuma had been there instead, it would have been A2 all over again. Besides, I don't see people complaining that Q just pops up for no good reason.
Rashid is my main, so I loved to see him. I hope Azam makes it. Could he possibly be a Darun reskin? I would love that even more.
All the ties into SF3... great stuff. The Alex stuff was basically Wolverine in First Class. They set up Sean wanting to practice with Ken, they set up Chun-Li's adopted daughter, they spent tons of time with KOLIN of all people (I totally called that being her), they planted seeds for Urien possibly taking over Balrog and/or Vega to his team eventually. And they had Gill voiced by Liam Grimoire Weiss O'Brien.
There's no real reason to remake SF3. They could deal with it mostly as a prologue to SF6 and build from there. Take care of the important story beats in flashback or in another character story mode.
Also, I totally want more of those stages. The one with Chun-Li's daughter was epic with the lighting, and I also want the extended New York stage AND the burning car stage. Shut up and take my money, Capcom.
Sure, there's some technical issues and the loading hurts the flow, but this is packed with fan service and a much better effort than I had dared hope for.