Of all the gaming communities out there, I'm pretty sure that it's the Fighting Game Players who take the cake for being the most myopic and adverse to change. I've heard friends, pros and commentators make the same kinds of statements about their hobby, frequently defending the worst parts of it.
I just watched a video from a Youtube Channel called Core-A Gaming, called "Why Fighting Games Are Hard", discussing why Fighting Games have a reputation for being difficult to play. I was more or less on board, until about halfway, when the Host attacked Extra Credits, a good entry level Game Design Channel, for a video they had put out about solving these basic problems.
Extra Credits essentially explained that Fighting Games are hard to enjoy, because there is a massive skill requirement before players begin to experience the strategic elements of the genre; the games can be very mechanically rich, but most players never experience that richness because they aren't good enough at the game to appreciate it. No one will really argue that point, either, it's definitely true. Extra Credits suggests doing more in single player modes to teach new players about the mechanics of the game in piecemeal, like most games do these days. But Core-A rejected that idea.
Now that wouldn't mean anything on it's own, but they then followed this up with the idea that you can't learn from a single player mode, and that to get good, you need to fight lots of other players and lose until you stop sucking at the game, and that it's in overcoming how bad you are that you will really appreciate what being good is, and that being good at the right time could even make you famous -- at least, at the community level. (And that's not exactly saying much, since I know of precisely one "epic" moment in fighting games, and I do not know the names of the players involved, and I am hardly in the minority.)
What I heard from this reaction was that an experienced fighting game player didn't want to see new tools aimed at inexperienced players, because he didn't see value in them. And then he glorified a subculture that thrives on trash talk and crappy attitudes because of how great winning is when you "earn" it. This, of course, completely missing the fact that most people aren't interested in playing a game, losing at it endlessly, and hoping that they will stop losing at some undetermined point.
This is also part of a greater issue I've seen with competitive gaming at large. People who get in to a lot of competitive games don't play these games, they study them, they practice obsessively, and deconstruct them. People spend hundreds of hours crunching numbers and reading articles and watching replays for games -- not so that they can better appreciate it, but just so they can master the existing best strategies. Strategies that are most upset when the developers feel the need to change things for one reason or another, not because players have developed some new approach.
I'm not worried about this as a problem though, and fans of most competitive gaming forms know why. And that's because it's a self-solving issue. When your game is inaccessible to new players, you get fewer new players; your community doesn't grow and eventually stagnates. Fighting Gamers are one of the most defensive about change, despite the fact that they are also one of the most insular gaming communities.
Many other games that struggle with these issues have other hooks: League of Legends and DOTA 2 for example have a social aspect in team play, and have surprisingly well publicized competitions; Magic: The Gathering has a physical component in the cards, the Skinner Box esque collectability, and an active secondary market. Fighting Games have big tournaments like Evo, but I don't see many other vectors for retaining interest.
It's not like Street Fighter is going to go away or anything but I suspect without some new fighting game to shake things up, that the interest may decay beyond little more than a tiny, self sustaining niche.
