@solid sharK: everyone has a PC nowadays. I can imagine some people (esp those who only play roms and PC games) might not want to buy a console for KoF alone. Considering how stages (for instance) have no impact on game-play, there is no reason why people shouldn't be free to have any stages they want on disk. Doesn't even matter whether your online opponent has them or not (unlike in Quake). All that's getting loaded is a bunch of image files, some light data (for the shading on the characters) and presto. Now, obviously, there's the issue of cheating and such when it comes to code. However, punkbuster has been around for ages and pretty much works every time. Add that to the fact that the engine is nice but not quite ground-breaking (hell, nothing is in the world of fighting games LOL) and one could almost argue that they might as well release the code and allow community programmers to take a stab at it (I remember quake 3 had three separate "houses" of code: one for graphics, one for game system and math stuff and one for dealing with networking and windows. If snk did something similar, then all the community needs is the graphics bit. I doubt a lone wolf programmer would out-do GGPO.)
(Just took a look at SamSho 5/6 on youtube. wasn't impressed overall. Had some interesting stuff but looked too comical for my taste. the referee tossing stuff into the level, dogs and pets running around and fatalities were a turn off for me (don't get me wrong, fatalities were great in MK and primal rage, but slicing a little girl into bits isn't my cup of tea). Also, considering how much the charas in LB2 had in common with charas in SS, it would be rather redundant to have them in the same game.)