If I can offer my opinion, I'd like to throw out my thoughts on the whole grabbing situation.
1. Grabs being something that every character has access too seems out of this game's current scope, as others have said. More importantly, I believe that when 4nace said that he wanted to experiment with grabs, he meant for a character or two. Putting grabs in for every character, by this point in development, would require a large rework of offense/defense balance.
2. A single character having a grab (and being a kind of half-grappler) seems like a great idea. As to how grabs works with parries, it seems best that they wouldn't ignore the parry, as that would give that one character an extreme offensive advantage as compared to the rest of the cast. Meanwhile it's possible to balance that, it looks like it would come with many problems, not to mention how frustrating it would feel to get grabbed out of one of the only defensive mechanics in the game that no other character or move can penetrate. However, it doesn't seem right for grabs to activate the parry either, as the nature of grabs is different from that of an attack. Grabs aren't used for pressure, spacing, or comboing in the same sense as normal attacks. Grabs are often used as a safe option against a defending player, a way of countering pressure, or a way to reset your current pressure/combo in an unexpected and not guaranteed way. So, then, it seems best that a command grab would neither activate nor ignore the counter, but rather have no effect and leave both players in a neutral position.
I also want to provide some input on zoners in RoA, but I think I need to see (or play if possible) the game a little more before that.