I read the whole thread... took a little bit. :D
It has been said that BB won't really get the attention of any new/fresh players but I'll say that I recently started playing. Completely fresh to anime/air-dasher/"poverty" games but have been playing 2D fighters pretty regularly since 1994. What I'm saying is that, even though I'm a huge SF fan and have been damn near my whole life, it only took a single moment of proper Blazblue exposure to get me hooked! It happened randomly at one of the local gatherings, maybe only for about 7-8 minutes then my friend had to take off. I went back to playing SF and drinking... the resonance of the silky animations and the announcer's "COUNTER!" lingered the rest of the night. Woke up the next day, went out and grabbed a copy of BB:CSE.
Now... I've managed to turn on quite a few of my friends who are not "typically" fighting gamers. Mind you, none of these are folks that would ever go to a tournament for anything. I have had some success in taking it out to gatherings, being one of maybe four-five people that play locally... we get loud and excited and start playing for drinks (instead of money matches). I've managed to get a few of our more "hardcore" UMvC3 players to sit down and play several times and MOST OF THEM REALLY DIG IT. Now, the ONE THING that seems to be the main killer from WITHIN the FGC is the knowledge that there is some slack between updates/releases. Quite a few people told me that they'd actually buy their own copy if the I.P. settled down enough to let them purchase without fear of the next version coming out and everyone (locally) quitting until then. Unfortunately, that is the ebb & flow of games that aren't "the big two" + Tekken.
Point of this post was to say "...in your face, I am a brand new BB player! See?! New people DO pop up every so often." and "even though I might be a total scrub at the game, I'm still trying to turn more people on to it".
Here's to hoping that Chrono Phantasma will be the last update the game gets for a while, maybe people wouldn't be afraid to buy-in and enjoy a game other than SF/MvC3/Tekken...!
Peace