Well, the real issue is that the people we need to test this stuff explicitly AREN'T people who are in the community. We have been doing occasional testing of these changes on people, but those people are people who aren't connected to SRB2 to begin with and therefore don't have the experience with the controls that long-time players have.
As an example, one of the things we're messing with is an "automatic braking" option. Essentially, when enabled, anytime the player releases the controls, the game automatically puts in control input to try to stop. Older players (read: everyone reading this thread) would have no use for this and turn it off, but new players often struggle heavily with stopping in SRB2, and automatic braking makes the game operate a lot more like the official Sonic games.
The goal here isn't to improve the controls for our long-time players. You guys already have those controls nailed down! The goal here is to teach NEW players how to use our controls more effectively so they can have fun playing our game quickly. The complicated nuance that our game controls have for experts can wait; we need to teach players the basics, and that's something we've traditionally failed at pretty hard.