I'm one of those people who think that there is no such thing as "cheap" play in fighting games. Only badly designed games. I for example think that projectile spamming is a problem because they simply made projectile attacks too fast and easy to perform. The required inputs for fireballs and such could be more complex given the results. The problem being is that while they are something any character can deal with, the counter is usually far more difficult than simply hiting D-F-Punch.
Zangief only became "cheap" because people (like me) were using him to kill projectile spammers. Also people expect him to be a wuss after all these years, so him being a lot more playable in SF IV was a bit of a surprise.
I can't comment on Brutal Legend since I have no interest in it's multiplayer, however if what your saying is true, the problem seems to lie more with the fact that the game designers messed up.
See, the problem with "cheap tactics" is that if you know them, don't use them, and lose you always have the niggling belief that you could have won if you had "really fought" using what you know how to do. Thus for some players there is the issue of them not having fun if they feel the need to hold back.
Incidently I feel games with massive balance issues can simply be seen as those who fail at multiplayer. I consider Street Fighter IV to be a bad multiplayer game for casual fighting game players. You need to be on a relatively high skill level for balance issues at the lower skill levels to no longer matter. Some of the weaknesses of exploitable attacks, coming down to people who have analyzed frames, and come down to thinking about every possible manuver from every position, and how that manuver can be beaten... and of course being able to perform all of this flawlessly.
For example with people talking about how Ken/Sagat/Ryu/whomever aren't that bad and singing the praises of say C. Viper, your generally dealing with people who think like higher end chess players and see things in terms of potential exchanges, the ways they can go, and who winds up coming out ahead on the life bar assuming flawless performance of all the move/block/combo possibilities. Then your dealing with players who are as often as not jockying for position to allow for what might happen 4 exchanges down the line rather than simply tying to take down their opponent.
That said when your not thinking on that level and just "winging it" (ie your a "scrub" playing for fun who can perform some of the moves for your favorite character, has a few bread and butter combos down, and a decent knowlege of the overall mechanics) there are grotesque game imbalances.
I know many will disagree, but that is my opinion of the whole thing.
... also for the record, I like to think that I'm one of the people who made Zangief and Sophitia relatively "feared" despite the initial opinions in their games on release. I was basically eating Kilik/Nightmare/Siegfried spammers for lunch using nothing but 8 way run, a bit of blocking/guard impact, and two basic attacks using Sophitia.
I generally stopped playing both SF IV and SC IV because I got tired of the disconnects, and getting a poor sportsmanship complaint every time I won. Also due to sticking it out to play right this means I wind up with truely lousy win/loss ratios, at best typically rating about 50% except for Blaz Blue which I am awful at for some reason.
