Everyone can be countered by everyone in zero frames and do crazy damage that typically outshines the attackers. That kind of ability takes away from a lot of the character individuality and matchup knowledge. Hence why everyone fought the same way in DOA 4 with some very slight variations.
At the end of the day, unless you were genfu, it was strike, stun, and guess between about two hit levels or a throw. The odds were in your favor slightly for a single strike launch, but the odds of failure increased with each stun extension. Let's say you're a godly character with great stuns for highs, mid punches, mid kicks. Fast low stuns can pretty much universally be slow escaped with ease, so we won't count those in this example. If it took 5 hits to reach the stun threshold required for your ideal juggle, and you had 3 valid ways to extend your stuns, you had at least a 33.3% chance per strike of being countered.
Think about that for a minute. Your strikes only do like 10-20 damage each, but they can be countered for 50-80 in stun generally. The odds are actually against you here for reaching maximum threshold as well, simply through probability and repetition. A blind man can be mashing buttons and he has the same odds of stopping you as the best DOA player in the world.
There was no logical or safe choice to make for attacking OR keeping yourself alive, even when you had made every correct read prior to putting your opponent in stun. To make things even better, about 90% of the strings in DOA 4 have a massive window where you can delay inbetween each strike. This means there is no way to tell when your opponents string has been canceled until he is already pretty much back to neutral and the pressure is even again.
If that isn't a guess oriented game, what is?
