To be fair, size is much less of a factor in games like Soul Calibur and Tekken than it is for something like SF or Marvel, where there is much less of a concern of your opponent getting behind you.

I can't vouch for SF 2, but Sagat and Balrog are mid tier at best in SF4. Fei Long, Akuma, and Cammy are arguably the top tier, and you'll note that none of these are large characters, all with good speed. This is back from the original SF4 as well, before it got released every other year with a new adjective appended to the front.

Can't vouch for Virtua Fighter either, but just by looking up the only tier list compiled by a professional for the game, the character you mentioned is only 14th out of what I believe was 19 characters. Can't say that strikes me as "widely considered" being one of the best characters in the game.

I am saying that I'm totally discounting the possibility for him to be the next Meta Knight. Heavy characters, regardless of how good they are, always have a few bad-terrible MUs that can be exploited (Snake has Pikachu/Olimar, Wario has Marth/Dedede, Dedede has Ice Climbers/Pikachu/ZSS). There's no way he's going to be the best character, let alone Meta Knight levels of best character.

In regards to Wario, though...Wario's also a bit of a special case in that regard. He's fairly small for his weight, so his bad range on jabs is compensated for. He also has an incredible amount of recovery tools (which Bowser does not), fantastic air mobility (again, Bowser does not), and he has numerous safe approach options (again, unlike Bowser).

My point is that pretty much every good "big" character in Smash Bros has something else to back them up besides "they hit hard," because hitting hard can always be worked around with enough practice (see Sentinel in MvC3). Dedede has excellent recovery, a long grab with a chain throw that can follow up on almost anyone, and a decent zoning game. Snake has a good zoning game, his mines can make life hell for anyone who has to approach, and fast jabs. The closest any big character comes to being good while just possesing extra power/weight (i.e. no zoning game or the likes) would be Ganondorf from SSBM. I could picture Bowser possibly being close to him, but honestly Melee Ganondorf looks much better than 3DS Bowser did in that tournament.

Then again, it is on an entirely new system, and it is a game that hasn't released yet, so I obviously can't judge that much. All I'd say is to excercise more than a little caution before we all rush off to crown Bowser as king of Smash, because there have been heavy characters like this before that have looked broken and then turn out to just be ok-ish (I'll reference Sentinel in MvC3 once more). No one knows the ins and outs of characters for Smash 4 yet, and it's more than likely that Bowser just happens to be the easiest character to simply pick up and play.

Here are the rankings for older versions of Street Fighter 4. http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2012/mar/29/tier-rankings-super-street-fighter-4-and-older-versions/  The rankings you mentioned were from Arcade Edition 2012.

Virtua Fighter 5 FS gets its tier list from Arcadia magazine. this http://virtuafighter.com/threads/arcadia-magazines-latest-tier-list.15737/ is the latest version. There is also a list from american players http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Virtua_Fighter_5:_Final_Showdown#Tier-list.

Generally slowness even in a 2d fighting game isn't a problem as long as they have good reach, damage, and fancy tools. Everyone remembers Sentinel in Marvel vs Capcom 2 and the original marvel 3. Not to mention one of the characters currently dominating BlazBlue Chronophantasma is Azrael.

First off, the SF4 rankings that you listed are all extremely old and are within 2 years of the game's release, nowhere near enough time for a community to fully dissect characters and figure out how to deal with difficult MUs. 

I'd like to see some sources behind the tier lists for the Virtua Fighter 5 magazine, as in which professional players contributed to it. The chart I found (mentioned later on in the topic) suggested that Taka was average tier at best:

But I digress. Even if he was somehow amazing tier, and even if both SF4 and SF2 had good big guy characters, that's a paltry 3 games out of dozens of fighting games with notable exceptions of "good" big guy characters. And I'm not saying that it's impossible for any large characters to be good, just that they're almost never top tier.

Which none of these characters are. There's a difference between simply being good and being top tier; the character you mentioned in Virtua Fighter 5 is at best second tier on the sources you've linked, and even that's been somewhat controversial.

As for Sentinel in MvC3, he really was not that good. Again, similar to Ike, everyone thought he was good until players figured out how to beat him. By the time Ultimate rolled around, his usage in high level play had fallen off dramatically, and that was a mere year after vanilla released.

Keep in mind that the metagame in fighting games takes a long time to develop. I'll reference Marvel again; it took a while before people realized just how good Vergil was, for instance. People also thought Wesker was horribly broken for a while, and now he's not even in most people's top 3 characters in the game. Just because a character at one point was thought to be very good, doesn't mean they will stay that way long term.

I agree that the metagame for fighters takes a while to develop. That is why people assumed Jacky was bad at first in Final Showdown but now he is considered top tier  with Taka. Arcadia magazine does take input from all arcade players. This includes champions like Fuudo.  Your chart is mostly just the frequency of use for the characters and the skill of the players using them. Not a tier list. Even in Final Showdown, Akira is the hardest hitting character even though he is not physically large. he is still in the mid-heavyweight class. 

The reasons the tier lists changed in SF4 was not because of developing meta game. It was because of the constant patching and nerfs capcom was making. Sagat, Balrog, Honda, etc. were nerfed in later versions. What made them good before was no longer there. SF4, SSF4 ,SSF4AE ,SSF4AE 2012, and USF4 are all different games balence wise.

Sentinel was nerfed.

Though whatever. I give you definitive examples and then you try to downplay them even though they are real tier lists with examples of heavy top tier characters.