As a player who doesn't come on this site as often as before because of a loss of friends and the inability to make new ones. I'd like to make an interesting point here.
As much as I love CAS in Soul Calibur games nowadays along with voting (YES) to the importance of Create_A_Soul, I would have to say "no..." CAS is not important. But THAT only applies to the people who didn't develop the game in the first place. Now for those that did, well... that's pretty much why I voted (YES). Now for the players who only sticks to playing the original characters for respecting the originals, playing competitively, and also obeying tournament rules, I want to ensure you that there is nothing wrong with that and personally I think it's awesome. I watch streams and recordings of Soul Calibur tournaments ALL THE TIME. Shout out to Linkorz, Saiyne and Party_Wolf. However, there is ONE very important thing to keep in mind if you choose to only use original characters and never any CAS, or creative CAS at least because of the reasons above. It doesn't matter how good you become at using that original character, it doesn't matter what clothes you put on that original character, it doesn't matter how many tournaments you win with that original character, and it doesn't matter if you became world champion by using that original character. You can NEVER truly say that character is officially yours or that you own that character and that's because you did not create or design that character. You did not give Nightmare his name, You did not give Kilik his name. The most you're going to get from using that original character is a stamp... also the tournament prizes which usually doesn't range outside from money, trophies and gaming accessories. I'll admit, the trophies is the good part.
Now when it comes to players that DOES use CAS characters, there's a BIG difference. Depending on that you're not creating pop culture characters (in other words, iconic characters from tv shows, movies, other games, other stories, etc), You CAN truly say that you own those characters. You designed and named your characters. Of course you didn't create the tools to create those characters or the CAS feature itself but it follows the same exact principle of drawing a character on a piece of paper. You didn't create the pencil and paper either. If there's ONE thing that applies to both CAS and non-CAS players is that we all want something that we can call our own. For non-CAS tournament players, it's titles and trophies. But for CAS players (which I happen to be a member of), it's our characters and the ever-elusive possibility that one of our creative creations we upload would be good enough to maybe be made into one of the original characters. If that's not a win, I don't know what is.