Interesting response, glad I stumbled upon this as you didn't attempt to TELL me you were doing it *nyaa* LOL. I've been fiddling around with super street fighter 4 a bit lately, trying to find exactly what I am going to do with the new roster and if I can get anything out of it. In doing so I have figured out a few things about my play style. Perhaps we could make something even more interesting of your point.

Send me a friend request (i am Meyeselph on x box live.) and fight a match or two with me playing as my main (Sakura) and see how I use her, and what I'm good at and what I suck at (I would describe myself as a hit and run annoyance poker.) then suggest to me what character I should learn, and I'll move them into my rotation of characters as I learn to see if I gel with them. If trying to learn that character doesn't work out for me then I have a more solid case for thinking fighting games just aren't for me. If it does work out then I have an awesome character to work with.

I was worried about what the writers of the original articles would think about this exercise, but for the prompt to work people shouldn't feel like they need permission to do it or feel that they are attacking someone else by writing the article.  If I was asking other people to do that, then I should be willing to do it myself. 

I don't want to seem like I'm ducking you, but I don't have a Gold membership right now. If I can I'll try using a friend's account or getting a 3 month card to reach you.  As for whether fighting games are for you I've played fighting games for 10 years, but a good 7 of them were on console ports against my brother and my best friend, and I didn't know anything about combos or strategy. There are more ways to play fighters and more learning resources than ever before, but I guess it also creates the perception that if you aren't S-rank after a few months you've chosen the wrong genre. My advice is to keep on playing and more importantly find others you enjoy playing with.   

Righto, understandable that you don't have online. Also I didn't mind you using my article and comments as a jumping off post (more attention for me, yay!) but I would have been dissapointed if I missed the opportunity to see it. So I'm glad I ran across it!

No pressure on my suggestion since you don't have easy access to me. I just think that it would be interesting to hear your ideas on what would be a good character for me, with my being bad at combos, bad at prediction, bad at projectile spamming and bad with anti air dragon punching, but decent at reacting with normal moves, patience and using character speed for hit and runs and grief tactics.

As for my experience with fighters, really the problem for me is I can't get anyone to play against that doesn't simply destroy me or that I don't just destroy. I can't get a sparring partner to learn with and no good people will 'take me on' as a student. So I just end up not knowing what I am doing right or wrong, getting frustrated with all my experiences with the game being negative, and then giving up after a while. If I can reach a comfort zone with a game I can become good with it, I learned FPS games from the ground up with the halo series, all I needed was halo 1 having the best difficulty balancing ever. I learned how to play by challenging myself and observing the game and seeing what did and didn't work to change my tactics as I went up a difficulty level. The problem with fighting games for my learning them is their single player games are universally awful at teaching mutliplayer tactics, you are either destroying the AI or it's destroying you, it's never obvious what you should or shouldn't be doing. I can't replace that with a reliable friend as of yet so theirs a big hole in my ability to teach myself and overcome my large shortcomings.

It sounds like you're looking for a character with a strong arsenal of normal moves like Chun Li, M. Bison, and Balrog.  Learning charge character combos can be difficult for some people, but these characters can get by with a solid understanding of their normals and other "fundamentals". In Super all three benefit from an across-the-board damage nerf, particularly with Sagat and Ryu's Ultras, while staying fairly unchanged.  Vega is probably the best fit for the playstyle you're talking about, but while he got a lot of good new things I'm not sure how easy he is to learn.

As for learning you definitely need something other than Xbox Live to keep your interest.  You should probably seek out a local scene at a college, LAN Center, game store, or if they aren't available ask them to hold something and see who turns up.  Even if you do poorly often those places will let you play casual matches before or during the tournament.  Everyone starts somewhere.      

Edit - Probably should include Blanka again. While Bison can hit and run sometimes, in reality you should be pressing your offense if you use him.