You're never going to get rid of tight links - even SG has them. The thing is whether those links are necessary to get close to the character's potential. I'm fine with most stuff being relatively easy, but people will always aim the highest dmg/stun/positional advantage even if it means a harder combo, and I'm fine with this too. Perhaps my perspective is warped because I play a character with 1f bnbs, but I actually like difficult combos and find combo systems that don't at least giveyou the option to squeeze a bit of extra damage out with some finesse are less interesting.
SF4's quadruple 3f links (and the like) always struck me as pointlessly hardcore, especially when they're regularly dropped at the highest level of play.
Not to sound arrogant, but 3f links aren't really that hard, especially when they become 4f with plinking.
Don't care if shortcut input options are in the game or not so its whatever to me.
In general I don't mind input leniency (for example, I'm fine with the shortcuts for 360s and whatever you call Cammy's hooligan motion), but there are at least two things I really don't like about the input system in SF4:
1. For a reversal you can just mash 131313131 and get an autocorrect DP, and even if autocorrect is removed it's stil not ideal because during the motion the defender is blocking for half of the frames while they are mashing their input. If they are forced to input a proper 623 then they are blocking for none of them and are only completing the motion on every third frame instead of every second one, thereby increasing the probability that they will miss the reversal window/gap in your combo.
2. The priority of fireball and DP, while not strictly a problem with leniency/shortcuts, is related. If QCF was to take preference over DP and a proper DP motion was forced, then it would more or less remove mashed DP reversals because 623623623 = 236236236 = fireball reversal = lol.
I hope they don't bring back that many old characters and just make new ones.
If the rumours about the inital roster only being 16 characters are true, then I doubt that'll be the case. I just really hope that in that case dulpicate characters are removed (though significant variations on a playstyle are fine, e.g. I wouldn't mind having Ryu and, say, Sakura or Dan) and that the characters that primarily rely on randomness/gimmicks are given a back seat or fundamentally changed.
EDIT:
I pray they bring it around, though if it has ggpo in it i will at least play it at a casual level.
One last thing - Living in Australia I'm all for better netcode, but I cringe every time someone mentions GGPO as the only way that it can be achieved. GGPO likely doesn't have a end-game perfect implementation and there's no reason (history aside) that Capcom or someone else couldn't produce netcode that is just as good or better. GGPO
-level netcode? definitely.