Never understood why people hate on the sfex series.
For starters, cats hated on the game because it was in 3d, which is a no-no for 2d purists, even though the game played on a 2d plane.
Another reason the game is hated on is because of the extra characters that Arika designed (some where in a game called Fighting Layer which is another fun game). Personally, Arika's characters looked way better than Capcom's (I only felt that Dictator, Claw, and Blanka were creatively designed), and when you think about it, any Capcom fanboy or VF hater can't argue that SF characters are more or less "attractive" than VF character designs, because quite honestly they're on the same level imo; Capcom just happened to design theirs first...
The fighting system was alittle unorthodox in the first EX to be honest. You had the ability to cancel specials with another special, and you could do super cancels into other supers... That's how Ken got his shoryuken~roll~shinryuken combo originally, not CvS2... Plus there were certain conditions in where you could juggle the opponent to a certain degree... EX2 took advantage of that with the excel combo system...
Honestly, anyone who calls himself/herself a SF4 player or has ever played the game needs to get on EX2+... Capcom literally stripped this game, and put it on an engine similar to Battle Fantasia (which SF4 got its inspiration from [Ono said it!!!]); Battle Fantasia is faster than SF4 though... EX2 has meteor supers which they basically turned into Ultras without the risk of losing all of your meter. Guard break became Focus Attack (Saving Attack in Japan), except in SF4 you have a way of canceling the move if you're not the "dedicated" type and are afraid of getting your unblockable beaten by something like a mashed out shoryu (damn 09ers lol j/k)... Then Capcom added some of the good features of SF3 and put it in SF4...
Anyway, the game is great imo... Sure there's some broken things like Chun's infinite (which is actually hard to do), and Rosso has a 3 meter combo that takes out a grip of life, but even that takes some serious practicing to do, the game should've gotten more love... Maybe an HD remake would help that...
Straight up, I feel the same way about EX2+ as I do with KOFXI... The game was ridiculously great, and is the 3rd game in the great debate of the best KOF, but 98 players, 02 players, and everyone else that falls in between kinda keep it from getting any shine... Same with KOFNW...