It is a fact, not an opinion, that time spent
Any feature that isn't the fighting system, a character, a skin, a stage, or the story is spent on something that does not matter. No reviewer gave MKX bad scores because they didn't get to live their dream of being an amateur user interface designer.
The comment to which you were responding was complaining about the game being dissected, and you said that DLC is extra work and the studio doesn't pay for those things up front. True enough, but if the developers hadn't spent any time planning, designing, implementing, testing, and balancing variations, they could have spent that time on making more characters, costumes, and stages. Instead of making sure the base 25 characters were balanced 3 times, they could have made more characters which were fully-conceived. You want to talk about economy of time, don't try to defend production decisions which eat unnecessary time.