You're wrong. Tierlists are a theoretical assessment of how good each character is when played to their full potential. Not saying this doesn't have practical implications as well.

And it's not like taking a higher tier character is hitting the autowin button.

When it comes to low between -10/-16 Shun and Lion are quite equal in the shit departement, Lion might even be better with 466+P if you can do it consistently. But once it's -17 and above (ie most sweeps) Lion still gets shit where Shun got 8+K+G into good damage.
There's a lot of situations like this. For example if you block the pretty annoying Shippuujin PK (-18) or Sarah's 3+K+G which are suppose to be high risk moves your best punishment is still 466P , you need -19 to have access to 46+K wich is still not as good as 8+K+G... Not to mention Lei gets 9+K+G at -16 .

Thanks for the clarification Chibitox. Yeah I know all about Lei's +. My brother plays him and I eat it after every low trip is blocked. I mostly do + after a blocked low move, but I really need to start doing other things like elbow or even +. And Lion has + after someone is -20 right? I always forget to do it, or remember exactly which lows leave someone at -20. And I didn't know about at -19. Good to know.

-20 is pretty rare, common situation which is easy to remember is after Lau's PPP2K.
Against Pai PPP2K she's -19 so you should use 46+K.
But the important fact imo is that a lot useful lows (even full circular ones) which are supposed to be high risk at -16 to -18 are still "medium risk" against Lion as he cannot punish with good damage. I think 46+K should be 17 or 18 exe ^^.

More power to you if you can nail elbow from crouched positions. I bet trying it online has its difficulties!

I've found tier lists to matter very little among the larger majority of players in games. Fact is, a very minute number of players actually use their characters to their fullest potentials. These people tend to be your prestigious tournament regulars. And even these people have an idea of how each character tiers-out before lists are manifested.

Although good information for the extra-enthusiast, tier lists won't matter to me until I've reached the point that it should. Error checking and general game mechanics should be of far more concern to your typical VF player. This was the case with Tekken and I'd imagine it remains the case with all other fighting games as well.

Tournament level is different than elite level. Chibita is an elite player. If you play in Tokyo you will see that there are many tournament level players (i.e. they can play in tournaments and do not get embarrassed) who play in local and regional tournaments but who do not quite compare to the likes of Chibita. I think these players can feel the differences among tiers; changing the property of a key move in a version update, for example, really does matter.

For most of us outside of Japan, changing Lau's stance so that it flops on counter won't really net us that many more wins because many of us still struggle with using the stance effectively. But for tournament level players this change could mean the difference between winning and losing.

I think I agree with you that for elite players like Chibita it doesn't much matter because he has a once-in-a-generation talent. However, if you nerf a character too much there will come a point where even a talent like Chibita will cry foul.

Dude, changing Lau's stance is a big change :), I hit that move all the time. Just people didn't use it before cause there wasn't any reward other than trying to deal with disadvantage going into stance.

Just an exmaple dude...

All this is bullshit. There is no such thing as tiers and I'm sick to death of seeing them mentioned. If there was a robot that entered tournaments and could predict counters 100% of the time with Aoi, then you would be saying that she was the top tier character as she can counter any attack thrown at her. Tiers are just lists that tell you which characters elite player seem to prefer and not which characters are over-powerful.