Hmm. The purpose of the trials is 2-fold. Obviously it teaches you the combos for the characters and gives you an idea of what's linkable to what. The other is it gets your hands used to the motions and increases your reflexes. Over time it makes your inputs economical, too. So many of what they teach you is useful once…
I just learned this the other day, but when you RELEASE a button it counts as an input as well, so try doing some of your moves with release presses too if you're doing two attacks with the same button in a row.. it seems necessary for some combos. for example: ryu has one i did last night that i thought was impossible: it…
The game isn't sluggish... it's slow. There's a huge difference. Once you play some more and get the timing down you'll see how responsive the game is. The game is really good at detecting your inputs. The input windows are different, I think, for both normal and special moves. You'll notice this when you do the training…