As someone who's reviewed a lot of fighting games, yeah, it's not an easy beat.
The ideal review would be to "imbed" with the game for a couple months to get more of a feel for its ins and outs. The issue is that by then, most interested people have probably decided whether or not the game is for them. There's also the practical "if you don't post a review within a week or two, you won't get eyes on it." Also, I fear that any review that spent too much time with the game would involve a bit of Stokholm Syndrome -- "Well, I've invested 1000 hours into KOF XIV, and now that I've learned everything there is to know, it's great and everyone should play it!"
As for the feature set thing, yeah, I agree. I recommended SFV despite its lack of content, and I've played about 200 hours of it so far (I'm on the low end of time spent, too, I imagine!) I didn't care there wasn't much to do because what was there was enough to keep me playing. That said, the kind of features MK provides are sometimes fun (Deception is my all-time fave MK despite it being one of the much-maligned 3D games), and feature set is worth pointing out to people who won't have time to commit to a single game.
