To be honest, art style, memes, or a small cast really pale in comparison to my biggest issue with Skullgirls... it's just a boring fighter at a fundamental level.
Skullgirls, despite clearly trying to be some mixture of MvC2 and Guilty Gear, manages to be the complete antithesis of both; its combos are very long and drawn-out, damage is relatively low so these long combos get repeated a lot, and the constant changes, especially those to IPS, do nothing to convince me that the developers have any confidence in their game's design and/or any idea how to make the game actually fun. Skullgirls is full of good-on-paper ideas (IPS, 360 help, unblockable protection, command grabs including the throw command, etc.) that come together to make an incredibly "safe" game. There's no risks in game design, and I get the sense that that is because Lab Zero is so afraid of making an "unbalanced game".
Meanwhile, MvC2 has more variety in every match despite there being around 10 viable characters in a cast of 56, glitches that lead to unblockables, 1-frame normals, and damn near unreactable resets that can destroy an entire team in seconds. Meanwhile, Guilty Gear is a game where the developers' idea of "balance" includes a grappler having an unblockable full-screen hard knockdown that lasts longer than a normal hard knockdown, a character that is entirely built around free alpha counters even though every other character needs to spend 50% meter or a burst to escape blockstun, a character with a command grab that combos into itself, and in general your only option on wake-up is "time to guess, asshole", and it totally fucking works.
.