A ditto match isn't a "counter", it's "neutral".
And why does he need a counter to be beaten? Jun in SF3 and Xianghua in Soul Calibur have no bad or even neutral match-ups (making them technically BETTER than MK since most agree he's neutral with at least Yoshi, and close enough to neutral with a couple others), yet they aren't banned in their respective games, nor do the dominate their metagames.
*in MythBusters fashion* There's your problem!
I dunno a lot about SF3, but the thing about SC2 is that it was much more about how well characters were baited into attacks that led to particularly brutal combos over and over. Guard Impacting made it so that nearly any character is at least very strong defensively, so the characters that eventually stood out were those that were either extremely powerful (Mitsurugi, Taki, Cervantes) or were extremely good in a wide variety of ranges (Xianghua, Ivy).
Once the level of play got high enough, Guard Impacts made it so that the game basically came down to spacing yourself well enough so that you can find a hole to do that ridiculous combo (or in Ivy's case, the strongest grab in the game that takes like 1/3 of your health away) and the higher the level of play the more these distinctions mattered (i.e. either really strong or really good in a variety of ranges). Why do you think the largest SC2 tournament ever eventually came down to Cervantes, arguably the most powerful character in the game in terms of attack strength, and Ivy, definitely the most diverse range of attacks in the game?
In the case of Xianghua, she has speed and range, but her ability to attack at different ranges isn't nearly as good as Ivy's which is why at higher levels of play, Ivy can have an advantage; she just needs to find two good holes and Xianghua is finished, which is somewhat easy for Ivy to do since her range is so variable, whereas Xianghua is always forced to get closer to Ivy to do her more deadly combos.
In the case of Brawl, it really comes down to three distinct zones of play: on the ground, in the air, and off the stage. Every single character is at the very least just average in one of these zones, except MetaKnight. MetaKnight is ****, not just good,
**** in all of them.
This is why you can't really compare SC2 to Brawl or vice versa. Their mechanics of why their tier lists or match-ups are spread out that way are very different.
And yes, it's pretty much impossible to balance a game perfectly. Starcraft, definitely one of the most competitive games on Earth is accordingly balanced by Blizzard on a regular basis still has discrepancies, namely that it's very hard for a Zerg player to be as good as a Terran or Protoss player. And even card games that have ban lists and such, like YGO or M:tG, are checked for balance all the time but still result in lots of one-sided deck archetypes.
