One of the complaints you hear about 3S a lot is "and people couldn't latch onto it because of all these lame new characters." But the characters are quite solid! Alex, Hugo, and Ibuki are awesome. Sean probably could've been Dan but Sean is fine too. Necro is literally a thousand times cooler than Dhalsim. Yun and Yang are pretty cool and have no comparison from earlier games. Dudley's excellence speaks for itself.
In fact as you go down the list, the only possible downgrade is going from Guile -> Remy. But neither of them are any good so it's a pretty small issue!