SolheartStud

The archaic stuff stems alot from its insistence on leaving old characters/things unchanged. When SF2 was conceived it was the first game of its type (a modern fighting game). They designed each character around a set of special moves. To make sure that people would play the characters, and that those moves were important, they made them really, really good. For example, ryu throws hadokens, and has a dragon punch, that's pretty much it (Zangief SPD, Bison knee press, etc...). A more modern game (GG, BB), characters are still given powerful special moves, but the characters are designed around a set of tools. Heck even the new SF characters are designed in the modern way. This is part of the reason Capcom tried to get rid of all the old characters in SF3.