As someone who has clearly put alot of time into Rep I must disagree and I'd like to see your viewpoint but I don't. So let's discuss.
The thing about the forceballs is that he can ex slow ball and it is very difficult to clear easily, he can stop them, and some characters have to have specific timings to get a jump punch without getting hit by the forceball. And yeah, you can low profile forceball, but Reptile can slide your low profile, unless you're advancing under it.
My understanding of your viewpoint is that losing armored claw (breakable, punishable, mid that causes gaps)
and losing combos off of a bar from pounce (instead getting a whopping 12 damage) off a move that does not track and is absolute death on whiff
is worthwhile because our acidpool now stops run ins (for a bar).. which acidballs, spit, normals, dash, and slide already did (Also makes this still worse than Errons caltrops (which dont cost bar) and aliens acid which sticks and can be meterless. As well as saving a few frames off of our spit.. which also comes with a damage reduction btw.
I completely disagree. We lose a risky 3/4ths screen "50/50" I'd argue is reactable. that could do 28%ish and lead into setup (which was already punishable and very easy to whiff with) . We also lose our armor which I'm mainly mad about cause it removes our only anti air option (unless our d2 suddenly works... dont get your hopes up). These all cost a bar too so they were not free especially for a character people consider meter hungry.
^Also we lost the Rektile special.. (ending a string in a klaw so we could armor through their punish with an armored klaw)
Spit is mainly used as harassment and trying to catch feet as they jump over acidballs which we may be a bit better at. Acid puke has a completely useless effect because its not what we needed. We needed a larger aura so knocked down opponents or thrown opponents would recieve damage from our pool the way other characters pools work (plus ours is metered, theres doesn't have to be) so I feel like we lost considerably more than we gained and you seem to be 1 of very few that disagrees. Can you elaborate why you think its a good trade for us?
(Also noxious wasn't touched.. That suprised the Hell out of me)
You said the extra armor on our low profiling full screen slide is great for the grandmaster matchup.. this we don't see eye to eye on. The only reason I considered grandmaster a 6-4 and not a 7-3 was because we could pounce and catch an unwitting sub zero with a decent damage counterstrike. We don't have that anymore.
Personally feel like we were a strong mid tier character with nimble and deceptive being arguable for A tier. We recieved nerfs while some characters recieved buffs, nerfs and buffs or just changes were it was an even trade.