Thing is: They keep trying to "casualize" their animu air-dashing and it just alienates people after the tournament one year later.
Granblue is dead on a vine, especially on PC. Blazblue Cross-tag is somewhat viable but dead/dying, especially with no Evo this year for it. Guilty was always niche, but "popular" niche because of it's music. Blazblue was it's own thing and only because of Sega-Sammy issues at the time. Once they got Guilty back most of the west didn't give a shit about Blazblue.
Dragonball is the only "casual" fighter they have that is popular and that's based on the popularity of Dragonball, if Marvel: Infinite didn't fuck up most Marvel players would probably be playing Infinite over DBFZ, but that's just me theorizing.
AFAIK, the reason they're redoing the models is because they went from Unreal Engine 3 to 4. Which I don't fully understand why they'd have to redo all that work, but apparently that'd be the reason (or whatever) due to pipeline/work-flow redo's.