the best of all time. has it's issues like any fighting game, especially one that gets long in the tooth but in the scope of what makes a fighting game 'good', in the sense of personal expression, creativity, competitive drive, intensity... it's very, very, very high up there. it doesn't get enough credit for how smartly designed it is across the board, especially in the scope of mvc3->umvc3
it's a real damn shame they got their legs cut off mid-development for UMVC3 in exchange for SFXT, but it is what it is.
an interesting aspect to it is that it's basically the last modern fighting game that got to experience a natural evolution/lifecycle of it's tech - no patches, no seasons, nothing like that. just players in the sandbox, working things out their own way. it's very much the last of it's kind in a lot of ways.
that unreleased patch probably would've introduced it's own slew of issues, but the top characters definitely were probably the biggest issue overall in what stops it from being seen as an all-time great in general. even then, morrigan is probably the last time a low tier hero char will ever truly see that kind of success story, livni' the dream and all, haha.
a shit tier character going from arguably one of the worst in the game to the best in the game by pure player exploration and nothing else. not a player being exceptional beyond belief with a bad character, but genuine development of the character's tools and understanding of the game causing a paradigm shift. it's the stuff of stories.