I think punishing moderately well and knowing decent combos for every launcher your character has will get you past the Dan stage fairly quickly.
For example, with Mishima, just keep 1,1,2 handy for punishing everything. You don't have to think about it, just do it. Sure you'll miss spots where you could have punished with an EWGF, but at least you've done damage, knocked them down, and shown them that they cannot spam garbage at you without retaliation.
You also don't need to use bound and/or TA in every combo. Have your main launcher combo in mind and hit that. Once that becomes second nature, go ahead and add to the tougher-to-get launchers.
Oh and block lows.
