I know what you mean. I typically don't subscribe to the whole "MK should be more like Street Fighter" B.S., but the damn Hadouken has been the same quarter circle + punch for the entirety of the series existence, and its fine.

Sometimes it seems NRS is so dead set on reinventing the wheel every game, they forget that familiarity(even with something as small as the inputs for a special) isn't a bad thing.

When the series initially translated to 3d it was difficult for me to get my bearings with Scorpion and Raiden in particular, but eventually it became natural to me to do the back, forward.

I agree - I'd love to see Reptile's face chew. That was a great finisher during an awkward time for the series.

This all began when the series hit the 3D era, but we have to remember MK has change hi core combat system maaaaaaany times. Street Fighter has keep his core system so it doesn ́t need a lot of changes among their character moves, but whe the Dashes where introduced in mortal kombat, some foward foward or back back moves where not translating tooooooo good in the gameplay. For Example.

If you where full screen to your oponent, and wanted to do a little bit of Zooning to your oponent with a forwar foward fireball, you couldn ́t do this without slightly dashing foward, and thats exactly what you didn ́t want to do.

Now that MK has found a new core fight system, present in MK9 and MKX, that includes dashes and most recently stamina bars with the incapacity to launch a move right after a dash... Back back and foward foward moves seem to be Inappropriate for the game.

I'm glad they got rid of it. Oldschool button inputs were not meant for Xbox 360 thumbsticks.
That Arcade Kollection game thing that released, single handedly back to back fucked up the spring in two of my Xbox 360 controllers thumbsticks when I played as Liu Kang that sesson. And I don't use the Dpad when I play fighters on the Xbox 360....but heh I guess I fucking do now because I don't have any other option. Xbox 360 controller's durability is god awful, I can just imagine the Xbox One being the same.