Here is an updated tier list by ifield. It seems to me like VOOM became way more popular in the PS4 Masterpiece era and the play level has improved, at least compared to the PS3/Xbox era. Some "master-class players" now exist that only started in the PS4 era. Others apparently date all the way back to the arcade release. As long as there are a few players that old, I think ifield's lists should replace the "old generation rankings" I spoke of earlier. (If there is no intersection in population then it is not safe to assume that current players of an extremely old game are better than the original top players).
There is some comment in Japanese here that looks like it is saying something about doing a relatively new "watari turn" technique on pad which could be influencing this list. I presume this technique mainly moves Raiden up, however I had learned about this technique from ifield in the late PS3 era, so I am not sure why it only impacts now. The Japanese players tend to speak as if it is a PS4 era technique, so maybe they were just slow to communicate its usage.
Belgdor has dropped. The PS3 era was when Belgdor skyrocketed up, as new advancements in rowing technique and aiming prediction napalms changed how he played. Now that this has become old, it is natural that he begin regressing to his original lowly status. However, there are still a good number of master-class Belgdors, and one new one, and improvements to his rowing continue to be made. The newest master-class Belgdor player is one to watch out for, in my opinion.
At present, Raiden and Fei-Yen are popular VR with players of all skill levels and are being improved upon. I am not sure if there is presently a dominant champion of Raiden, but there are hordes of good ones. There has been a dominant champion of Fei-Yen since before the PS3 days, and they've been around since the beginning. A super awesome swimsuit wearing vtuber. It's a bit worrisome because this person is several leagues above all other Fei-Yens, so if they have trouble with a certain VR then they are all alone. No one can help them improve in general, or learn new tactics to deal with Apharmd.
I was talking to the swimsuit girl in the PS3 days but they weren't active, so I never saw Fei-Yen as possibly being truly competitive until the PS4 era. I had zero chance to win using Fei-Yen against CapsuleBoy's Temjin (VMS on this forum -- he was the lone very active western player and almost tops on the PS3 leaderboard). But when I came back on PS4 after 6 years of retirement, suddenly I could defeat CapsuleBoy, so my theory was that everyone got traumatized by the swimsuit vtuber. Actually, the champion vtuber appeared only a couple months before I did. I purchased Masterpiece to follow and worship them.
Fei would probably rise higher in a 2022 tier list due to the return of her champion, but it's not time to rerank yet. In my opinion, there are 5 other players who use Fei-Yen often and are competitive. Maybe just 2 who could potentially help the champion anytime soon. There's 3 of us who use a lot of Fei/Temjin/Apharmd so I'm hoping we can help push that 1:9 bad Apharmd matchup just a bit.