I would agree but consider this, AA does not have a community to begin with. There really are not many cabs in the US even. You cannot befriend the community when there is no community to befriend.
What you're stating here is that the sequel in a series has a different playerbase than the previous game. This line of thinking is ridiculous and mostly untrue. People who played MBAC are obviously going to look into MBAA because they want the newest thing available, and that is who the MBAA community is comprised of at this point. Lack of availability does not mean the community does not exist; the scene is obviously not as strong, but that's to be expected. Having a situation where the community disavows the newest game is usually reserved for when the game is perceived as inferior to the previous iteration, and in MBAA's case my understanding was that many people, myself included, find it superior to MBAC. In such cases, the community will migrate over and become the default playerbase for the latest version.
I think netplay would at least give us the option to better connect to those players we otherwise couldn't and would help the community overall in terms of numbers = stronger community. Im sure casual players can turn into serious players ergo through netplay and we would have more participation in tournaments.
As far as netplay goes, the problem is not bringing in new players via netplay (because netplay is good for that). The real issue is what kind of players it brings in. "Why travel when you can netplay? It's almost as good and it takes much less effort, right?" Truth is, people who want to travel to tourneys after starting on netplay are the exception, not the rule. The MBAC scene has many people who have proven this time and time again. Most people netplay
because it's easy and effortless compared to traveling for a casual gathering or a tournament. If someone doesn't even have the dedication to find local people to game with, they more than likely do not have the motivation to improve themselves to tourney-level.
(And before you go down the road of "there's people who can't afford to travel/have no time/live too far away from everyone/whatever other reason": yes, netplay can be a useful tool for them, but they are not going to be central figures in the community because nobody's ever seen them. You probably missed when Veteru finally made an appearance for MBAC after years of spinning theoryfighter at anyone and everyone, and how public perception of him changed drastically after that... well, for some people it did anyways.)
We could still have some AC players make up the majority of the AA community and hold small events or whatever but it would be nice to have a variety of players that I just don't see happening with only a PS2 release.
Completely baseless assumption. How would having more netplayers be any better than having more offline players? Are netplayers somehow more interesting than offline players? Does having more scrubs make a scene more "varied" and "diverse"? Would a PS2/offline only release not be able to develop a variety of playstyles? This statement doesn't even make any sense. If anything, it sounds like you simply want it to be easy to play for everyone, which is a fine goal in and of itself, but not the way to developing a strong community.
And on that note, let's look at one of your earlier statements:
...and would help the community overall in terms of numbers = stronger community.
A community with more players is not always strong. Things are not that simple. For any given community to survive you need two populaces within it: the hardcores and the casuals. The hardcores are the ones who define the top level of play and give the lower players something to strive towards. At the same time, there needs to be at least a semi-regular flow of new players so the community does not become stale. There must be a balance between these two populaces. When you have too many hardcores, the newer players are turned off by the learning curve and lose interest in learning most of the time because they realize they're up against too much experience and knowledge (see: IaMP, MvC2). When you have too many casual players, there is never any drive to improve and, for many players, no visible path towards improvement because they do not understand what higher-level play is made of (see: US SWR). In both situations, the community stagnates; one from lack of growth, the other from lack of upward movement.
Netplay is a fine tool for communities but it should not be the basis by which they are made. Not to mention, even if there was a PC port for whatever reason there's still no guarantee of netplay, so until a tool was made it would only make things more difficult for the serious players who would be forced to use PC version as default instead of PS2 (see: the hassle at running MBAC at any event due to having to fuck around with USB polling rates, installing drivers for converters, getting a setup that doesn't lag, looking amazingly ghetto having to play your game on someone's laptop...)