I've been playing since DOA5 Vanilla first came out, so since 2012. It's really different compared to SCV but I think it's cool. I'm sure you'll get super good at it, haha.
Who do you use? Maybe I could help you out getting started. The ingame tutorial helps, but I would recommend going to EmperorCow's youtube and watch his video tutorials since it covers just about everything. It's for Vanilla, but it still applies.
She's new so I don't really know much about her. And yeah, she's like Dural from Virtua Fighter. To me she seems pretty good, she has 6T to give her +10, 33T for a lot of HCH damage, and her strike damage is decent. Definitely watch Kwiggles and SonicFox play her at Winter Brawl. The vids are on youtube.