Do you think this even for Vanilla and SDE? I know resets were still a valid option there, to deny your opponent meter, but it seems silly to call it the focus of the game to me.
Also, I don't see how the effectiveness of quick resets is a point in favor for long combos being an option. That means when a long combo does happens its pretty drastically different pacing from the game otherwise. You'd have dynamic, on your toes gameplay for the first part of a character's life bar, and then 20 seconds of long combo at the end to finish them off. Kinda of a similar issue with Marvel 3, you have some cool neutral and spacing followed by 45 seconds of ToD: The Movie. Why not have cool reset based gameplay for even longer?