In average the coders spend enough hours on this project to be able to pass it as a second job. And your small graphics improvement as you call it is not small at all. Those little improvements of yours are days if not weeks of work.
As for the point of the buddy system. Some characters dont have transformations which leaves them as well totally useless. To counterbalance the chars with no transformation to lets say SSJ3 Goku they get the buddy system. Basically making you a 2 character player. The buddy helps you fight against the SSj3 and not to mention you cant be killed unless all your buddies are killed or if you and your buddy get taken out at the same time. Since instead of dying you just switch to the currently selected buddy.
But yea in short. Comparing even the current inteam with 1.2.3 is like comparing ESF 1.2.3 with DragonmodZ ^^;