Coming to a realization about painwheel:
I post this not to say I'm the first one to come up with this, nor as a way to toot my own horn. This is basic stuff that I'm only just now understanding. I assume that many if not all painwheel peeps already understand this and have more than likely understood this for awhile if not perhaps even the first time they used painwheel, this is just in case anyone hasn't yet figured this out, outside of a muscle memory thing such as myself.
There are many differences between painwheel a flight and capcom flight characters flight. I'm only here to talk about one difference though:
All of painwheels flight attacks UNFLY. This is already known and obvious. The point to consider within reference to other capcom flight characters is that not only do there attacks NOT unfly, but most capcom characters have moves that CONTROL THE AIRSPACE DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THEM in a high priority fashion.
Magneto has optic blast. Ironman has unibeam, sentinel has his frying pan and rocket punch. When flying at MAX FLIGHT HEIGHT though, painwheel really doesn't have a fast high priority move that controls the airspace right in front of her. And when you combine that with the fact that she unflys when doing any flight poke, it makes a lot of sense that she can't ACTIVELY control her neutral air to air with buttons when flying, like a lot of marvel flight characters can. This makes her feel very different to marvel flight characters... But im getting off topic.
The point is at max flight height, painwheel has few to no "real" spammable air to airs. She can control the airspace in front of her well... But only if she does a j.mp or dash j.mp.
If she tries to do this from max height flight, it won't affect much of the air.
So, this is interesting to note as a primary reason why flying painwheels are so turtly. We have no real way besides our movement to SAFELY control the airspace in front of us when we are at max flight height.
Which is the gist of this post. I like everyone else realised this at first glance at painwheel. What I didn't realise was... Why.
The why allowed me to further realise that painwheel actually CAN control that area of space right in front of her. But that she can only do it while flying at medium height flight. At medium flight height pw can up forward j.mp and it will control a huge amount of space IN FRONT of painwheel.
So my realisation was that there are actually attacking benefits THAT MATTER when changing up her flight heights at neutral.
Max flight height is good for:
Turtling via evasion and setting up an air to ground jump in for pw.
Medium flight height is good for:
Controlling the space right in front of her.
I don't know the full ramifications of this as they might be able to change up a bit of her matchups at least in my own game, but for the people that don't use the medium flight height pw fly mode, you may want to look into it if you haven't already and would like to be able to control the airspace in front of you while flying without having to jump.