the process of relearning

What does it take to completely remake one's game?

I've come to terms with the fact that my fundamentals in Street Fighter are extraordinarily flawed. It's not that I've suddenly had a revelation about it, waking up to realize that By Jove, I've Got No Skills! or anything to that extent. It simply has to do with the fact that my basic fundamentals and abilities are bunk. I'm finding that because I have a groundwork for what skills I have and it's been laid out over the course of so many years (flawed as it is), I am having an incredibly difficult time adjusting to new games. Namely, I simply cannot play SSFIV at anything resembling a satisfactory level.

People will look at me and scoff and tell me how easy SSFIV is and how it makes no sense that I don't understand the game. But that's just it: I'm so used to learning things through exposition and teaching that I've found that it's practically impossible for me to overcome certain walls through my own realization. While my capability to adjust has always been a little sketchy, it was certainly there and I am able to make some adjustments on the fly to adapt. However -- and I'm not sure if this is just lack of familiarity with the game or something more minute that I'm missing -- I simply haven't been able to make the full transition to SFIV. And it's really starting to irk me, because I have had just as much time as everyone else to make the transition, and I'm not getting there.

I've come then to the conclusion that a lot of the groundwork that I've laid out to play SF with is intrinsically wrong, and there's no longer any helping it. For instance, I suffer from the same issue a lot of players who start their fighting game careers on The King of Fighters (and in general learning fighting games in a vacuum, against the CPU w/no competition) have: I'm used to jumping, particularly to jumping forward. I am transparent when I am going to do this and I do it often. Having to reteach myself to jump straight up to avoid fireballs was difficult. Developing a ground game from the ground up was very difficult because I never had to think of things like beating out my opponents' pokes with my own before. 3S and CvS2 helped me move in that direction, but I didn't apparently learn well enough because my ground game still sucks, and it's just really apparent in SF4.

But scrapping your previous game entirely is really difficult. How do you do it? You will still fall back to certain things in your muscle memory. I've only recently tried reinventing myself, switching my pokes of choice and starting to be concerned a lot less with winning in the "now" and trying many different things to see their results to build for success in the future. How do people cope with that, and how difficult is it for you readers to change your mindset to do this? Have you ever run into this problem, where you've become so obsessed with the present state of your game that you couldn't refine your skills? Is this the wall everyone eventually runs into?