Daigo: "If you are crouching, your movement will definitely be too late.". . . "Above all else your movement is most smooth from the neutral. Just like everyone goes crazy from one or two frames of lag from the monitor, you have the same loss when you are crouching."

Source

Another quote:

Daigo: "It takes one or two more frames for the Sobat to come out. Same thing with the air throw. You have the flash kick but Akuma's air fireball can force you to delay the timing. Your hit box becomes larger, and it takes time to stand up, so I started to think there weren't many benefits to crouching. With those factors in mind, I think you should stand up. If you are standing, then there are only three patterns, moving forward, backwards, or staying neutral."

What do you guys think about this strategic insight?

In my opinion, it is interesting because it supports a theory I have been running about SFV - that its design philosophy is around taking precision out of combos and injecting greater precision requirements to the neutral.

The reason I believe this is due to the following changes from past SF games to SFV:

• Normals are less active, making whiff-punishing require high accuracy (kind of like how 1f links forced precision inputs)
• Stages are small relative to mobility, meaning it is rarely beneficial to give up even tiny amounts of space
• Dashes are fast, meaning that you must either space accurately or be in a position to predict versus just reacting.
• Anti-Airs aren't as strong relative to other games, meaning that you must consciously decide to be in jump-in range as a high-risk tradeoff
• Crush Counters mean that just whiffing a button without thinking about it can be devastating: it means you must commit
• Fireball spacing is resolved in 1-2 jumps/dashes rather than 3-5 as in SF4. Throwing an errant fireball may destroy you rather than being inconsequential: commitment!
• Normals are stubbier - meaning that entering attack range puts you at greater risk of cross-ups and gives up projectile functionality
• Backdashing must be done with good decision making due to being highly punishable.
• Sweeps control less space at greater risk, forcing more careful choice of normal usage
• Defense and reversals are weak, meaning that stage positioning (specifically, being out of the corner) is essential and being backed into a corner can be fatal

Essentially, being consistent in the neutral game means being exceptionally precise in punishes, decision-making and stage control! Corner control is essential to the point where choosing to stand neutral rather than crouch-block represents a significant gain to stage control and mobility.

In a way, SFV is conceptually like Ed as a character: you don't need to work very much on execution, but you need to be very aware of spacing to be able to succeed consistently.