As a Rain and Sonya main in MK9, I acknowledge how useful and important it was for me to understand the match-ups for my characters, so that I could understand their weaknesses and strengths against other characters. Characters like Subzero and Kensh could be a pain in the ass for a Sonya player because it was hard to approach Kenshi and when you're fighting Subzero, you have to change your gameplan, you can't go super rushdown at him unless you want to keep eating his ice clones. With the variation system now in MKX, it may be a lot easier to manage what department which your character lacks in. Kitana and Johnny Cage are some of the examples that illustrate perfectly what I expected when I first heard of variations. Kitana's Assassin and Johnny Cage's Fisticuff are more rushdown oriented, while Kitana's Royal Storm and Johnny's Stunt Double are meant to be played defensively/zoning. That's exactly what I was expecting: variations that differ significantly from each other and that may drastically change a character's play style. I can already assume that Kenshi's Balanced would be a bad or a 5-5 match-up at most for Kitana's Mournful, considering how bad the match-up was for Jade against Kenshi in MK9, but that's just an assumption. I plan to main Sonya again in MKX and from what I saw, she looks pretty rushdown to me. She can be insane with those grenades in her Demolition variation, but also can have a more strategic play style with the Special Forces variation like Kung Lao's Hat Trick since she can park that drone and play mind games with the opponent. Kenshi's Balanced could be a tough match-up, but his Kenjutsu doesn't seem to be a threat, that variation is Emac-esque. The most important thing is that we're not getting another Kabal all over again.
Having said all of that, I think it would be tough to create match-up lists here on the forum because you have to consider all of the characters' variations now. As Ed Boon said, Subzero B could be shit against Scorpion A, but Subzero A could body Scorpion A or C. Of course, tier lists could be easier to come up with because there aren't that much variety in every character's variations, take Reptile for example, he has only one move for each variation.
Thoughts?
Edit: I noticed that they included the frame data for every character string combos in the movelist, including start-up, active and recovery frames. How AWESOME is that?!
