Guess I was too tl;dr for that drive by attack. Oh well, I'll just spam some more then.
The only thing ASW did "wrong" was miscalculate just how much drama would be created by the perception of character DLC making it out of the pipeline so soon after the game hitting the market.
You can't directly compare SF4->SSF4 to BB:CT->BB:CS. Every time ASW pushes out a new game, they're not just adding new characters. They're doing an entire new storyline with art and voiceover work for every character, since it's a story heavy game unlike SF4. They need to save the major product releases for the story, not character updates. Capcom released the same game twice, with new characters and admittedly some improvements. SSF4 also has the advantage of also being a 3D platform, which simplifies the amount of work needed to generate all the animation assets for each character immensely. (and to a lesser extent, art and movie assets - higher resolution textures is an old hat trick)
Given the economic position of ASW, they're perfectly justified to work on new characters between releases and make them available for DL. Think of it as paying for the privilege of playing the game at least half a year earlier than we would have otherwise. If you don't want to pay, save your money for the next game, which will have the new characters anyway.
Yeah, I know. Nobody who is complaining about the DLC characters is going to care about these points...many won't even read the whole thing. As a consumer it's much easier to only skim the surface facts, and make steep demands because someone else seems to "do it better". Welcome to being the little guy.
Anyone who considers themself a longtime fan of ASW and has a problem with this should seriously sit back and think about this for a moment. ASW doesn't sit on numerous successful franchises and reap the profits from all of them. They're a smaller outfit. The economy has been hard on everyone the last few years, and folks are gruding them money because they made the "mistake" of releasing BB:CS with story content for the characters in the arcade release, and decided to start working on animating new characters for DLC after submitting the game for review.
But hey. If you only want ASW to re-release slightly more polished versions of the exact same game with new characters all in one shot, I guess you're doing a good job of sending the message.
Hopefully they'll be paying attention to the real lesson: people are greedy, and you have to forego immediate release of DLC characters in order to avoid the perception of "cheating" the customer. Better to make the fans have to wait for no other reason than maintaining good public image, y'know? :D