I totally get this, too.
If anything, I guess the mentality I took to that post, was that if the word “scrub” really, truly has to be co-opted for any purpose in this debate, then it should be extended in the most faithful manner possible, i.e. to those crying “cheap!” about a game mechanic, even if they’re not doing so in-game – and whilst I wouldn’t push for that usage outside of the game, when we have people splitting with “healhy debate” and running out the same tired arguments without really modifying them at all in the face of sound counter-arguments, it does start to gain a kind of aptness to it. Further extending it to people stating their objections in good faith (such as yourself) was an attempt to extend an olive-leaf to @DeathBlooms2K8 more than anything else, but I probably shouldn’t’ve taken it in that direction.
Thanks for the (pre-emptive) appreciation! 
The workload isn’t specifically what’s stopping me (although I am lazy, so I suppose that’s a factor). The main hurdles for me have been,
-
I’m no game theorist, so I’ve had to do some reading up. I’m a CS/math graduate whose last year of study was a pure math (or maths – but I’m indulging American vernacular for the moment) honours year, so I know things about Riemannian geometry and functional analysis, my project area in CF language theory, etc, but I’ve only taken so much as a passing glance at anything game-theoretic. Only recently when I bothered to flip open the big algorithmic game theory book I’d bought for a grad course that got cancelled (and a supervisor I ended up passing up – which is a shame, because he’s really good and I’d have a much deeper understanding of game theory if I’d stuck with him, but then again I didn’t know I’d be trying to model fighting games now
), did I come to realize that I was actually just dealing with two-player zero-sum games that fed into each other, which are pretty much solved by straightforward linear programming, and the real work is in dynamic programming and maybe coming up with an approximation scheme (which is actually more in my wheelhouse than the pure math stuff – I just went with the latter because my university really doesn’t have a TCS program anymore 
). (Also, I think this answers a question you asked about me waaaaay back in the old forums. Sorry about the delay!) -
Obviously I’d want better information about how the system works. How does the game scale damage? Does KV scale? What about PD? Why do certain combos seem to do less damage when the opponent has less health? (I’ve seen it throw off ender levels before. I don’t like it.) It might even be nice to know how damage and KV are represented – fixed vs (ugh) floating point, etc. Then I need to get data about not only how much damage each move deals, but also KV and PD. I could just throw out the idea of modelling it 1-to-1 (which, if I’m to be honest, the way I abstract the combo system into interconnected games isn’t going to be perfect either) and try to just give honest figures to everything for the sake of making the big-picture points I want to make (e.g. the pros are leaving tons of damage on the table!), but I think still lack a credible way of “faking” the systems that I don’t understand, and I’ve been reluctant to frame my way through match footage and take subtle measurements of lifebars, or piece together combo damage data in practice mode and attempt to infer a damage scaling function. This would all be expedited considerably if the devs gave us more data up-front than the (already very generous) amount they provide in practice mode…nudge nudge wink wink
…but I’m not getting my hopes up for that. -
Also due to my detour into pure math, I haven’t written a substantial program in years! It’s pretty shameful, too – there was a point where I was knowledgeable enough about Java to where I was considering building my own toy JVM for kicks, but I kinda started hand-waving a lot of implementationy stuff when I got deeper into computability theory. But I’m looking to go back into software dev now, so actually I should probably take the plunge, build this thing and even add it to my portfolio. There’s just going to be a bunch of annoying work involved in bringing myself up to speed with 5 years of web technology, etc. (I probably want to build out an entire web app for this so that people can plug in data and mess with it.)
Come to think of it, all three of those are subtle variations on “I’m lazy”. 
“Fenrisulvur” was a slur on an Anglicization that I liked of a notorious wolf of Norse mythology, tricked into being bound by gleipnir and fated to grow to gigantic proportions and consume Odin himself at Ragnarok. I picked it when I was more involved in the local Metal scene, because of reasons.
I removed the vowels on an impulse when I set up my Xbox Live account, because someone had stolen my username and I didn’t want to think of a new one in the moment or throw numbers on the end of it. Funnily enough, I think “Fnrslvr” can still be pronounced phonetically the same as “Fenrisulvur” if you look at it the right way.
I’m considering changing it, or maybe just cutting even more letters off, but usernames are such a messy thing to alter, so I might be stuck with it.
