She was still making a consistent showing everywhere, which is more than some characters can say.
How surprising that a character which was a must-pick for 2 versions and very fucking good afterwards doesn't just get dropped like a hot rock?
Also surprising that a character which can go anywhere on a team, and kinda on any team, has a notable count of tournament appearances..
Since the inception of the game, the top picked characters are Double,Filia,Parasoul,Bella; and then later Fukua+BigBand were added to those.
Simply because those characters are playable anywhere, everywhere. Doesn't even have anything to do with them being good!
The "problem" with character variety in this game is that Mike didn't want characters who are "just the assist", so he made all the characters with notably good assists/dhcs also strong on point; and this isn't even yet considering that most of those have 2 positions from the get-go (Mid/Anchor), rather than just 1.
On the other hand, characters that are notably good on point didn't all get good Assists/DHCs (more like the opposite)..
.. So we have a bunch of characters that are 'designated anchors', who also work everywhere else, and a bunch of characters that are 'designated points', who you will largely only see on point (or at best as "fake anchors", where they're 3rd on a team so they can Tag/DHC in asap).
If you have 3 people who like Fortune and Double, but one of them likes Val more than Fortune and Bella more than Double, while the third finds Peacock a bit more fun than Fortune and thinks Band is better than Double, you'll get:
1) Fortune/Double
2) Val/Bella/Double
3) Pea/Double/Band
-> Despite all 3 people "wanting" to play Fortune+Double, we ended up with 3 Doubles and just 1 Fortune.
*This alone* makes determining character strength based on the count of tournament placings grossly inaccurate, and I haven't yet started on just general character popularity, ease of play, topplayers "winning with anyone", etc
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On Para Tears:
In days past, I voted for Snaps not detonating tears, because there will never be a scenario where you'd want it to happen. It was still largely avoidable, but just felt cumbersome.
For throws it's different; it's entirely possible to create a scenario where the exploding tear after a throw (or airthrow) can be used to your advantage - so I am rather against it.
IF something were to be done, then "Throws detonate Tears" makes a lot more sense to me than "Throws make Tear just disappear".
You'd still need a different route, but now with plenty hitstun it should be trivial to find a combo path.
The animations already create those big flames on both throws anyway, so visually it wouldn't be too off either.