I agree, the beta was more responsive.
As I said in my first post, it seems the devs only were able to really test on local multiplayer, and did not/could not fully test in real-world environments, so all these changes they made were made based on the local multiplayer experience.
In the real world, those changes don't work out as well as they'd anticipated.
The weird thing is, I can play any other fighting game on my PS4 and not experience these issues. For the most part, if I try to time an attack in Mortal Kombat, most of the time I am successful. In UFC3, it's a crap shoot. In order to defend against anything, I have to input the controls before my opponent even begins their attack, and even if I do that, half the time it doesn't work.