Yes, definitely agree Billy is contender for top 10 in the game but he's basically only good as a starting character maybe 2nd and never anchor. I think that kind of limitation affects his placement on a tier list in comparison to some of the other characters.
Hwa Jai is definitely climbing the ranks because of how Reynalds, Romance, Tokido, Mago, and other notable players have been using him. He definitely wasn't slept on at the release of the console version because there were several people (including Mr.KoF) who were calling Hwa Jai top tier after the console changes. It just took a while to exploit all of the new changes.
CEO Day 2 Summary:
The top 4 for CEO is the usual suspects with only a few upsets, primarily Mago sending Romance to losers.
Mago is definitely a lot stronger then Tokido in KoFXIII and it's just the way he fundamentally spaces himself, imo. Tokido seems very jump happy with his characters and that was one of the things that Romance picked up on during their sets, which eventually led to his victory over Tokido at MLG. Xiaohai also picked up on this at SS2k11 and started to utilize Billy's normals more to dominate Tokido after the reset.
Mago on the other hand, while still aggressively jumping in, spaces himself out better and mixes his ground approaches better than Tokido. His Hwa Jai was also on a very different level from Tokido's who seemed to fall into certain patterns. Overall, the two of them (Mago and Tokido) suffer from a lack of match up experience since KoF is not their main game.
Mago vs Bala in winners finals - I'm pretty certain Bala will end up beating Mago. Will it be convincingly? I'm leaning towards yes but I think the key point will be how quickly Mago's Hwa Jai is dealt with.
Romance vs The Answer in loser semis - The favorite seems to be Romance mostly because Romance has been in the spotlight a lot lately. However, I think it can be a toss up between the two and The Answer had a really nice showing against Bala in winner semi's. Character selection is going to be really important in this.