To me, it sounds like a matter of personal philosophies based on training in other things. You have been trained that using your whole arm is better, for example…
But for me, I do music. In drums, a HUGE mistake that a drummer can make in the beginning is using his arms to drum. You’re taught to use just your wrists, and then to use your fingers. Eventually, you’re barely moving at all? The reason? Extraneous movement makes it hard and tiring to play quickly.
If you ask ANY good musician, they will tell you that the true key to speed and clarity is to not waste ANY movement at all. If you watch a really, really good guitarist play an incredibly awesome lead, they will look very casual as they do it; it’s almost as if they are playing something absurdly easy, like one note over and over again. If you just watched him with no sound, you would probably guess that he is playing something very easy. The TRUTH is, he is moving in a way that cuts out ANY extraneous movement so that he has as much time to move to the next frets and play the notes as he can possibly give himself. If you want proof, try it yourself; see how fast you can drum on your desk with your fingers, and then compare it to your wrists. And then, compare it to your arms. See which one is the fastest?
This philosophy holds true to me when I play Street Fighter. You’re going to have to be ship-shape and precise. You don’t have an option to WASTE time with any body movement. Your philosophy would work well with drawing, I agree; this is because you don’t have to draw things within short time constraints. The same holds true in Street Fighter. When you’re in training mode or something, you can afford to take your time with movement and such, because you’re not being FORCED to act quickly; however, play anyone worth their salt at a fighting game, and you’re gonna want every last millisecond you can get.
In a fighting game, you’re FORCED to react. Matches only last 99 seconds. You only have so much time to do something, or lose. You are going to cause your opponents to have to react to what you do, and in turn, they are going to cause you to react to them. You’re going to want to do it as quick as possible. You only have a short time to catch someone with a Shinryuken when they jump over you…or if they whiff a crouching attack (let’s say a medium attack), you only have a window of less than a second to capitalize on your opponent’s move. How are you going to take advantage of it?
I am going to take advantage of it by being sure I can react as quick as I can, with the least amount of movement possible. Not only is the distance needed to do a Spinning Pile Driver likely to be at LEAST 2-3 times farther on an arcade lever than a Direction pad, but you would need to move more of your body to do it. You will likely never be able to do an SPD on an arcade lever with just your fingers, and IMAGINE how sloppy it would be to try and do it with just your wrists! This means you’ll have to use the ‘slowest’ of the three muscles here: your arm. Do you see the milliseconds just adding up?
If an arcade stick is one’s preference, then that is fine. But, personally, I just don’t see how an arcade stick is better in the long run. Less precision, more lever movement compared to d-pad movement, making it slower in the long run; and it requires more muscles to achieve the most precise movements. When it comes down to the final attack of the match, and a person with a quick, short jump and long ranged air attacks like Vega or M. Bison decides to jump at me, and I need to counter it with a Bushin Hasso Ken or meet my match, I’m gonna breathe a sigh of relief knowing that at Evo, we’re not using arcade sticks. The end.