To Scott: character customization isn't as big a draw as you might think. People like to see the bullet point on the box but more often than not you see normal characters online and T6 was a big show of that. SCV had quite a bit more customization online but still I was seeing more normal, uncustomized characters.
Matt...you're looking at it in a kind of weird way. Other than releasing close to Tekken, DoA hasn't done anything to make the competition wary. I'd say this kind of marketing, aside from just being in Harada's character, is more due to EVERY company's wariness of releasing a game into a market that's close to becoming over-saturated. The companies know they're sort of racing against the clock because too many fighters are coming out so close to each other and this isn't a problem any of them have had to deal with since the late '90's. That's pretty much it.