People are wrong about liking high character strength

Before we start: I'm a certified Mahvel hater, so feel free to ignore the rest of this.

But, in my opinion, (the majority of) people who say they prefer high-power fighting games are wrong. Not lying, per se, I just think they dislike nerfs and extrapolated a reasonable-sounding opinion ("the game is more fun when more characters are strong rather than when more characters are weak") from it.

Except, I think that's simply not true. My smoking gun here is the trajectory of DNF Duel.

Whatever you think about the game, it's very clear that it's a high-power game. Oppressively so. The only way of dealing with all the bullshit your opponent does to you is to do your bullshit to them faster and harder. And it's fun! For a week. Until the true bullshit is unearthed^[1]. Then, you either keep up, or have absolutely no shot.

There's probably many reasons why DNF Duel didn't catch on as much as even the rollback-less Granblue, but people getting tired of the high power levels definitely contributed, in my opinion.

Of course, I'm not advocating for nerfing every single character into the ground, either. If they're gonna be updated at all, games need a good balance of buffs and nerfs that aligns characters with the average power level of the cast.

The average power of a cast decides a lot about the game, and different games cover different levels, so you can pick and choose. It's just, I think it's reasonable to say that people are picking-and-choosing things with less extreme power levels.