Crouch Cancel / Floor Hugging is ruining the game for me, and could be bad for the average player

To put it simply, it is not fun when you correctly hit your move against your opponent but you get punished for it. It's one thing for a few moves that are more powerful later to be CC'd early. And it's one thing for weak hits of moves to be unsafe on it. But I think it's inexcusable for most characters' moves to be unsafe on hit regardless of how they are executed. And for this to exist at low, mid, and high percents, it feels like every answer is the wrong answer. At a competitive level, it forces everyone to base their neutral around crouch cancelling. But more importantly, at the average level, it makes players feel like they are always wrong. If I hit my opponent and get punished for it, I won't want to use that move anymore. If most of my moves are unsafe on hit, I won't want to play the game anymore.

It's not like CC is fun to execute either. Holding down just so I can punish my opponent for incorrectly hitting me does not actually feel like I'm outplaying my opponent. It just feels like I'm abusing an overtuned game mechanic.

I understand the "necessity" of it. Without crouch cancelling, really strong moves, both grounded and aerial, are very unbalanced because they are always good at all stages of the game and always combo. It makes it so getting hit even at low percents results in taking big combos and punishes. But that's not actually true. CC does prevent this yes, but it's not the only option. It's just the lazy one. Moves can be balanced so that even without this powerful of a CC, they aren't overly powerful at every stage of the game. But it requires fine tuning every move in the game, which requires a lot of rebalancing over and over again. This is prooooobably unrealistic.

Soooo what to do then? While I think CC is a terrible mechanic, I understand its value for the developer's sake to assist with game balancing. But it's way too strong right now. Most of a characters moves should not be unsafe on hit. In fact, barely any of them should. I wish I could say I know exactly how to tune it but I'm not a plat fighter code wizard. But to speak in layman's terms, I think CC should be heavily tuned down so that moves are safe on hit. At the same time, moves should have more scaling to their hitstun so that characters don't always get a free combo for landing any hit in their arsenal until higher percentages. Even if all landing an Ftilt does is get you some extra percent without any frame advantage, it's much preferred to your opponent taking your stock just for holding down on their analog stick.