I'll defend him a little bit when it comes to Street Fighter 4 because that game used Delay-based netcode and a good part of it's combo system is reliant on 1-frame links (I.E. Jab, Jab, Medium, Special, then maybe FADC cancel into Ultra). Now, a 1 frame link is like a fraction of a second and requires perfect timing. So even if both players have amazing internet connections the inputs can still drop because the game wasn't designed with online in mind. It was designed as an arcade game first.
Absolutely, you're totally right. Capcom's netcode has historically been mostly unacceptable, and you're dead on about SFIV. Even offline w/ plinking you'll see combos dropped at tournaments. And yes, online inputs can certainly be dropped or misread. However, Phil's "latency" woes have a few deeply problematic symptoms:
a) He regularly "drops" basic,
fundamental motions. He can't consistently SPD, Shoryuken, Flash Kick, and so on. I'd give him the benefit of the doubt if he was making mistakes on very precise combos, but he rarely ever gets there. He even drops hadoken chains sometimes, which is insane. All of that just indicates very sloppy inputs. There's a clip in a TIHYDP of one of the few replays he uploaded in SFIV...his inputs are __PLOT TWIST__ a complete mess.
b) The amount of input drops he claims per match is just not possible. If it were so bad that you couldn't consistently get basic specials you'd see it on the screen and you'd see it in the opponent.
c) This is the most damning factor, though: his complaints are almost exactly the same no matter what fighting game he's playing. If you just listened to a series of TIHYDP clips with the audio context of the game sufficiently censored, you would never be able to determine which game he was talking about. These are generic complaints meant to rationalize his inability to practice and/or accept defeat gracefully. The other cute part is that he also routinely complains about dropped inputs in
single player games, which is just another extra nail in that already well fastened coffin lid.
As it turns out, the only thing Phil can properly pre-buffer is his set of excuses.