I complete agree with this in every aspect. Couldn't have said it better myself!I don't know if you can trim or downsize character roster. The next thing, Namco might start retiring some of the characters due to old age. tbh, Tekken just so happens to be one of the few fighting games where I do give a darn about the story. I don't think I had any problems with the roster, but I didn't find the story particularly interesting or at least memorable.
Actually, Tekken 6BR is a pretty balanced game in it's own right considering its sizable roster. Every character has a good chance of winning! no character is overly too powerful for another to beat (i'm looking at you SF4 AE! and MVC3) Even Tekken 4 was a major unbalanced mess with its massively trimmed down roster!And character balance didn't follow up with increased numbers of a playable characters for Tekken.
Trimming the roster down to a mere 20! are you serious!? and did you even play 6 enough to know that Nina and Anna play nothing alike! If anything Tekken 6 did and amazing job of separating the styles of characters who were derived from previous character (King-A.King, Nina-Anna, Law-Lee, Bruce-Bryan etc.) each character plays more unique then they ever have before!My bro stopped playing 6 entirely after playing it for about 3 months, and he strongly believes that the next Tekken needs to trim the roster to about 20 characters, and making sure that each is truly unique (less of Jin vs Devil or Nina vs Anna) and more balanced