Congratulations! You have accurately summed up why fighting games have fallen from the most popular genre of the early 90s, into servicing a tiny niche audience of "hardcore" devotees. I'm sure that Sega is extremely happy with these kind of sales:

1	Virtua Fighter 2		1.93m	Sega
2	Virtua Fighter 4		1.71m	Sega
3	Virtua Fighter		1.07m	Sega
4	Virtua Fighter 5		0.45m	Sega

You know, since the latest Virtua Fighter has struggled to sell half of what the series used to do on the SATURN, of all platforms. Or look at the declining sales of Tekken:

1	Tekken 3		6.91m	Namco
2	Tekken 2		5.45m	Namco
3	Tekken Tag Tournament		3.94m	Namco
4	Tekken 4		3.31m	Namco
5	Tekken		3.18m	Namco
6	Streets of Rage		2.60m	Sega
7	Tekken 5		1.32m	Namco

(Ignore Streets of Rage, I have no clue what it's doing in there.) Each of the last 3 games has sold less than its predecessor (Tekken Tag, Tekken 4, Tekken 5) and the most recent game barely cracked a million. That's a quarter of the sales when the series was at its height on the Playstation. This franchise is a shadow of its former self.

Piling on layers of additional complexity has never been the way to make games more fun. Sure, that's not to say every game should be a simplistic button masher, but there's a point of diminishing returns beyond which you start losing more than you gain. I don't think there's any doubt that the fighting genre as a whole has been servicing its most devoted fans - and leaving the vast bulk of everyone else behind. Sooner or later, developers are going to have to broaden their appeal, especially as the graphical demands for these games make them more and more expensive (and, recently, unprofitable).

On topic, I loved the original Street Fighter II, and have roundly hated its more recent incarnations (most of which were so complicated, I didn't even know where to begin). Now I'm actually interested in their upcoming game again. Capcom seems to be pretty on the ball lately.

The Wii has been good to Capcom.  As long as they make decent games, it will continue to be so.

Sounds very promising to me. Especially on the Wii as a lot of old school gamers (like me) have Wii's and this would suit them very well. I'd also like to see how Capcom (one of the only developers to really 'get' the Wii) uses motion controls (or not) for this game.

Accessibility has always been one of my favourite things about the Soul Calibur franchise. Anybody can walk up to that game and understand that you want to use vertical attacks for reach and jumping targets, horizontal attacks for sidestepping and fast enemies, grabs for close enemies, and kicks to quickly interrupt a big attack. You can quickly grasp the basics to be moderately effective with any fighter.

A pro will understand how to execute the most effective attacks or combos for the situation, or how to manuever a foe for a ring out.

Imagine a game of chess where you had to perform a double backflip with doing numerical integrations in order to move a piece on the board. Maybe untie a Gordian Knot to declare a Check. Paint the Sistene Chapel inorder to declare Checkmate.

See, there's a great game buried there, but I'm not going to waste that much time learning how the tools work in order to start playing the game. I've obscured a fantastic mind game with unecessary feats of dexterity that has little to do with the mind game people actually want to play.

Sadly, fighting game developers tend to slap more and more complex tools. They keep the most of the dedicated fans but scare away all newcomers. And the userbase rapidly shrinks. Every fighting game series has gone through this pattern. The only major exception is Smash Bros, but that's only 2 episodes long so far. *kicks Capcom for forcing sequelitis*

SF4 has suddenly become much more exciting to me. It sounds like Capcom will try to make it accessible to beginners. Good.

I've been beaten to it, but it seems like a long overdue lesson is being learned by comparing the success of Smash Bros to the lackluster performances of more complicated fighters.

I stopped playing mortal combat, and street fighter after they kinda got so freaking complex

I fully support those ideas from Capcom.  SF2 turbo is still the most played fighter when I get together with friends to play games.  This has actually upped my interest in SF4 conciderably.  I was hoping they'de do something more ambitious in terms of moving game designs forward, but this approach with the graphic style they are useing sounds great.