Haha, you're kidding right, any REAL hardcore fighting fan would pick neither. Street Fighter 2, Street fighter 3: 3rd Strike, Virtua Fighter and Soul Calibur before they would touch Tekken or DOA.

At the arcade, there's always one dude sitting there waiting for people to challenge him, and he will almost always picked Hwang, Eddie, Jin or Lei and they'll always win by spamming the same attacks. With DOA, it's the Ninja's. That tells you how balanced the games are (i.e they aren't) and that's why any competitive player of fighting games wouldn't pick those two games.

Lawlz, Why don't you go to EVO or a regional tournament before you try to tell me what a real fighting hardcore fan wants. Tekken is by far more popular in the arcade scene than VF, ofcourse I'm not putting down VF in anyway since it takes more skill to play VF competitively. But Tekken ALWAYS have the best pot/turnouts in U.S/Asian Tournys when it comes to 3d fighters, and yes, easily more than SC (which i ranked 2nd in SC2 during the Charlotte Mind Boogle regionals). And also, You CLEARLY don't know jack about Tekken if you think "Hwang"(who is a SC character),eddy or Lei is among the top teir characters, go to zaibatsu/SRK and read up plz. To be frank that dude that sits in your arcade waiting for noobs is what is known (in arcade scene terms) as a scrub, I own scrubs EASY, all you need to do is learn how to low parry and block (True ogre's FF,2 is a different animal). But yes, the hardcore fan would probably pick SF 3rd Strike over Tekken (but not SF2 turbo), but none of that matters since it's 2d vs 3d which are very different fanbases. Either way, i doubt you know anymore than me in anyone one of those games that you've mentioned.

Considering that Tekken hadn't gone online until the last installment, you can't say there's a far better community and be objective about it. Better combo system is also subjective, and it would be the "better" if you meant the ability to easily string combo's together but considering most tekken players spam 1 or 2 attacks, there's not much of a combo system (let alone a game mechanic to balance spamming).

Community (for fighting games) =/= online, Hardcore players much rather play side by side than on online and deal with frame delays, lag and people droping out. If you knew how important frames were in Tekken (or fighting games in gerenal) you'd know this.

Tekken strings don't work in competitive play but only against rookies. Tekken is far more about frame priority, buffering, wakeup game, sidestep and juggle setup/juggles. PLEASE get some experience on Tekken before you make false assumptions, if you have a PS3 go get T5:DR and I'll get back into the Tekken scene just to show you what I'm talking about . You can use whomever character you want, and i'll use whoever character YOU want to me use. Based on the information I'm getting from your post about Tekken, I'd say i'd easily crush you. And yes, even if i hadn't played tekken seriously in 2-3 years.