Why I'm depressed when I play fighting games

In SF4, american players simply CANNOT compete with the japanese in long sets because our scene is terrible at leveling each other up. We have generally terrible footsies compared to the japanese. Because so few of our players understand it our top players do not get experience against different "types" of good players, leading to them noticing "things that people I play against don't do". Online play is not the cause of this skill gap, but it is a large contributing factor because it has effectively replaced offline play as tournament practice for many players, including PR Rog. Without a strong, consistent offline scene we simply do not compare.

In KOF13 the skill gap between the intermediate players (like myself) and the world-class players (MadKof, Tokido, Romance, etc) is so large that there is no feasible way for players like me to catch up unless we moved in with those guys and played non-stop. Every tournament that does not have world-class players at it feels like a waste of time to me.

In both cases I don't notice many other players, especially intermediate ones, with similar opinions. Those players will probably never have the right experience to change their minds, either, as this would require they travel across the ocean or get lucky and face one of these monsters in a bracket at an american tournament. I don't feel like anything is going to change for any of the established games and that we're just going to see the same faces winning over and over. This frustrates me because our genre is not truly competitive if we don't have players that are capable of dethroning the kings.