With brawlers suffering the same fate as a lot of other once popular genres these days, what do you think were some missed opportunities for the genre during the height it reached in the arcade/SNES/MegaDrive days?

What sort of settings do you think were missed opportunities? We've had plenty of street gang games and a decent amount of classical medieval settings with a D&D styled party fighting through monsters. If you wouldn't have wanted a new setting, what good twists could have been applied to those?

Gameplay mechanics? We had simple combos for the most part with the odd special attacks here and there like magic spells or the much loved Streets of Rage police support.

I made a thread a few months back asking for good retro brawler suggestions and got an absolute load of responses and I've played through a good dozen of them now. I'm mainly curious to find out what /vr/ thinks were missed opportunities and not necessarily just a sequel to another popular game.

Personally, I'd have liked to have seen a slightly more comedic style brawler in terms of style and theme. The mechanics could stick largely to the formula, but perhaps add a larger number of combos and upgrades.