These were my questions
This doesn't answer any of them. And putting "questions" with the speech marks kind of shows you're just being an ass. I take it no-one can be bothered to answer the questions?
WHY IS GUESSING IN HITSTUN ANY DIFFERENT TO GUESSING OUTSIDE OF HITSTUN? That's a different way to phrase my question, in case you didn't get it.
I'm not disagreeing with some of your questions. Guessing happens in all facets of fighting games. If there was no mental thinking going on then the game is just automated by computer. Trust me, I've argued the same thing over the years, that those complaining about guessing ignore the fact that it exists in every game whether the player is going to back dash or srk after blocking for example.
However, the problem people have with the 'guessing' in Dead or Alive in comparison to the other fighting games in its genre is to the amount of times you are required to guess, and to the lack of reward from each successful 'guess'. The only time people feel rewarded enough is after successfully 'guessing' 6 to 7 times in a row just to lead into another guessing situation. The danger that one has for attacking in Dead or Alive 4 makes one wary of what they are doing more so than any other fighter. This leads to second guessing and deep levels of mind reading that are very taxing on the brain. In addition you're just not able to tell a lot of data from the small amount of time you get with the opponent to hope you are conditioning them, aren't conditioning them, or even if they are in fact being completely random. Standard game theory proves that even in the most chaotic situations where one player is being completely random, the non-random player will always win out. It's why poker is played in more than one hand ('game/round/match') to decide a winner.
As for your question about 'pushing the same series of buttons', that's due to the hype mechanic of technical skill. A game that not only rewards one for displaying mental skill in option selection, but also requires a degree of technical skill in pulling off route memorization, timing, and positional awareness has its own meta-game as well. People like seeing that the Focus Attack has landed, and they like seeing if the player can effectively maximize this chance they have to technically execute a series of guaranteed attacks. There's merits in both levels of skill, and if you give any guaranteed damage then it's best to require a user to give technical skill over making every single attack in the game do 10 damage and not combo into any other (i.e., without combos the game would be rated on what single move does the most damage).
As for bad design, it's up to how the end game plays. There's many 'games' going on that make it a complex game in the whole. I certainly would not prefer having one attack doing 50% life, and I certainly want to feel rewarded for reading my opponent. It's a balancing act in the end, and how you weigh mental skill and technical skill is up to the designer. For American fighting gamers they tend to want more technical than mental on the average, although I've seen in Japan it's actually the opposite way on the average. They want to feel rewarded for learning the system and applying that time and effort, as well as feeling rewarded for knowing more of the system and its opportunities over another player who is just playing the mind game aspect (going for a 10 dmg jab against a throw instead of going into a launcher against the throw or comboing into another attack to maximize the system and its layers).
