Yeah, this has been known since around the time the game was first announced. Instead of catering to the hardcore audience that stuck with them, they're trying to both recapture the SF2 fans that abandoned the series, as well as making the game accessible to new players. You talk about how SF3 isn't hard to play at all, but your examples basically say "play it just like SF2". That's the entire problem: the new features of SF3 weren't accessible to more casual players, and the gameplay refinements weren't noticable to them. Because of this, it just felt like "more of the same" to them, and they lost interest in the series. This isn't just a problem with Street Fighter, either; most competitive fighting games suffer from this problem, and over time they lose their more casual fans as a result.
For SF3, Capcom is trying to make the new features easy for more casual players to see and use. They want to game to feel fresh and different to these players, and not "just another SF2 rehash". (Funnily enough, at the same time they're trying to play heavily on the nostalgia angle. It looks like they've done a pretty good job walking that tightrope though, and have made a game that feels both new and nostalgic.)
