I don't get what you mean by "you must be this tall to play this character". Equating height to skill is a false equivalency. You can't get taller by practicing. Either way, it sounds like the devs just messed up the initial balance. It ain't the fault of the players who were serious about learning the character. That's the modern conundrum of games in the post SFIV era; constant balance patches before the full meta has been explored. Personally, I'm often dissuaded from trying to learn top tier characters in new games because of the fear that all the muscle memory I build will be useless when the game gets patched. It's gonna be interesting when Street Fighter 6 gets its first big balance patch a year in, and all the Ken and JP players take to their keyboards to complain.