As much as people like to laugh about it, Dive Kick is actually a good method of teaching beginners what fighting games are about. Too many beginners get hung up on the combos and never move beyond that in their thinking, which effectively slows their progress. Look at this thread for example, the one complaint you see in the initial post more than anything else is about combos, not about spatial awareness or defense.
Personally I HATE combos, and would love Skull Girls infinitely more if no combo was more then 3 hits long on any character. I find that combos are largely a barrier to the fun, which for me is all about the parts up to and immediately after a combo, controlling space, punishing mistakes, predicting or even training reactions, and just in general being unpredictable. But thats not the route they chose to go, they wanted to be another combo-fighter, and I've come to accept that and love the game for the other aspects of it in-spite of its combos which, at the very least, are much easier to execute then many other fighting games.
But one of the biggest issues with combo fighters will always be that they do tend to feel less accessible to new players. A new player doesn't know your or her character well enough to know what distance they want to keep you at, nor do they know proper punishes or even what is punishable. What they do know is that they hit you 5 times and only got you down to 3/4th of your life, then you hit them once and because of a combo got them down to half their life... and frankly that's pretty discouraging. The beginner whose got a desire for fighting games flowing through their veins may surrender this match but then immediately go to the training room where they work on combos on their own for a month before even stepping foot online again, but the average player is either going to keep losing in a game that seems completely unfair and eventually give up on the game, or find some one who also doesn't know combos and play them.
If they do find such an opponent, maybe they're still losing 19 times out of 20 to this guy who has better spacial awareness, but this isn't nearly as intimidating, the gap doesn't feel as significant even if it actually is, and odds are they feel like they're learning as they play, starting to get down said spacial awareness and the common tactics. Maybe they eventually reach a point where they decide to put in the hours in training mode to get really serious about the game and actually learn combos, maybe they never do, but regardless they've had a blast. This is why its so essential for a combo-based fighting game to have good match making, to make sure beginner players or casual players can get matched together, because doing so allows the game to reach a much wider audience and allows beginners to not be scared off by that very real entry barrier that lengthy combos create.
But I digress. The point I'm making is that while spacial awareness and all that is important to, all that stuff is a lot less visible, and a lot more learn-able, during normal play, then combos, and thus why combos get brought up more by beginners. If I get a bunch of friends together to play, say, soul calibur, and none of them are familiar with the game, we still tend to have a blast for hours even though I'm winning the vast majority of the games do to my superior knowledge of distance and punishes and the like, and usually by the end they've made up some of the gap between us through simply playing the game, but if I try to get a group together to play a combo heavy game like skull girls, the beginners only have fun if everyone's a beginner, the moment some one starts executing extended combos everyone tends to want to play something else. It's not a problem with skull girls, but with combo heavy fighters in general.
