I'm sure this is well known, but generally if you do a half circle on the keyboard, you get something like b, db, df, f, instead of b, db, d, df, f, unless you're REALLY careful.

Currently I have autohotkey set up to do half-circles when I press ctrl+down or shift+down. Curious if anyone else has found ways to get these to work on a keyboard.

Well, I never had any problem doing whatever move it was on any fighting game, using a keyboard... I played a lot of fighting games on the PC and I find it easy to have my right hand control the movement of the character, as opposed to the more widespread WASD scheme. WASD is great for first or third person shooters in which you have to look using a mouse, but when it comes to games that require precision of input, like fighting ones, I find it easier to have a "d-pad" layout of IJKL (or the arrow keys, but most computers don't have overly responsive or multi-tap arrow keys, so I just map them to somewhere in the right side of my keyboard), since I'm right-handed and my right hand is way more precise and has more dexterity than my left one, which I use only for attack commands, as all it takes is the press of a button.

I also don't think controllers are better at inputting commands in fighting games, the only option better than a keyboard, for me, is an arcade stick.

So, if you're not doing it already, try using your right hand for movement, instead of using the default WASD control, and see if that helps.

I have no idea WHY, but IJKL is working a lot better than the arrow keys. Thanks!

Depends on if your Keyboard has limitations to the amount of buttons that the buffer can accept at once.

The keyboard always is notorious for fighting games, If you really want to fix this issue, You could buy a cheap USB gamepad from eBay for $4 and use it.