I always said that bully combat system is braindead as fuck.
You deal like twice the damage your opponent's deals, you can semi charge your punches for easy guard breakers, you can spam the running tackle, you can strafe and block at the same time, you have more than enough time to get free from grapples by just pressing 1 button, your punches can hit mutiple enemies at once while the peds fighting styles can't (except for Gary and non-cliques ones).