Free Step Dodge

Damn. That was... five years ago...

Shit.

"too many option selects"
"Focus attack ruins footsies"
"too many defensive options, can't open ppl up"
"plinking is too hard", and so on and so forth

but fast forward to present day, and now SF4 was apparently the best Street Fighter ever made, and we just didn't know it, heh heh heh heh...

the important difference is that the SF4 bs was unintended, while the SF5 bs is very intended

SF5, or at the very least its first season, wasn't a competitively great game in my opinion, tons of Chun-Li and Nashes, friggin' jabs being the universal anti-air, reversal options not having (full) invincibility anymore which later on lead to the throws are very viable option and "take the throw" mentality, only 1 V-skill and trigger. At a higher level the issues that you mentioned about SF4

weren't really considered too problematic iirc. Vortexes were a thing and it annoyed quite a few people but those disappeared for the most part after the delayed get-up got introduced with Ultra. Also, they didn't make terrible business decisions with SF4 compared to SF5 so that's also another reason why people remember that game more fondly now. Big issue with USF4 in its final days was Elena really.

Elena~

it's funny if you log into SF4 these days you run into ALOT of Elenas (and Abels too, not sure why), not too surprising but it still blows my mind how broken that character is, granted i sure she would of gotten fixed had the game lived a bit longer, but now and forever they just have to deal with her

no hurtbox having ass, light punch that leads to the world having ass, cancelable healing having ass Elena

fun fact, if you FADC her uppercut you can actually switch sides with certain characters, works on wide hurtboxes so i assume it works on everyone; im too lazy to extensively lab ELena tech in 2020

Funny thing is, she wasn't even top tier, or at least from what I remember. The two things that you mentioned is why she was played a lot competitively: U2 and the fact that her hurtbox was funky, especially when she was crouching. Elena often had top 8 placings but rarely, iirc, won tournaments. Well, last time I played USF, which was 2 weeks ago I fought a few players who used quite a few characters.