That is the one thing I find with SF5 over MK11... when I pulled off a decent combo, I felt like all the time grinding in the lab was worth itTekken or SFIV
I remember trying to get down Ibuki Tsumuji loops for days felt so good to finally pull them off consistently.
THIS is exactly how I feel. I've been pretty loyal with my characters over many years......Kitana and Jade were always my characters. MKX was my favorite and kitana felt so fun to play......although I was sad there was no Jade im glade I got to play and get good at Mournful. This game I've been playing Jade since beta and then tried to play Kitana but ultimately went back to Jade. This game has sucked out the love I had for Kitana. She isn't fun for me to play AT ALL......she doesn't feel like kitana to me. There is no comparison between the way she use to play and how she plays in this game. As you said people learn the same couple combos and repeat over and over. I can sometimes have "fun" playing Jades Jaded version but its not anywhere near the time and practice I put into MKX with kitana. She is super limited in what she can do with combos.MKX because I feel like I could never practice enough characters. For example, Kitana had 2 different styles of combo (fan vs glaives) and each style has like a million possibilities of combos and conversions and stuffs. Tanya, Mileena, Sonya have more explore, 3 different playstyles for each character. Triborg is even bigger....etc. That's just about combos. We also got oki, setup, armor, hitboxes, gimmick.....
In MK11 I learn like 2 bnbs of 5 characters and already feel like there's nothing to explore anymore. Then I move to the next step, remember everyone's frame data and low/overhead/command grab, which is easy because each character only has like 3 viable strings to spam the entire match anyway. And variations don't help much in this game, most characters have one viable variation, and if one has more than two viable variations, they have extremely similar playstyle (Johnny, Kitana, Geras), except for Jacqui I guess... but you get the point.