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I've not done a real thorough analysis or anything, and I truthfully don't know what Sephiroth is capable of yet, but as a Belmont secondary, he feels an awful, awful lot like Belmonts, and I think his place in the meta will reflect that.
Hard-to-land moves that are costly to miss, same ledgetrapping concepts, projectile that gets beaten out fairly easily (hw = shadow flare), etc.
Fragile recovery, too
Many thought Belmonts were gonna be really good too. The parallels are striking: small get-off-me NAir, poke and catch landings with ftilt and FAir, shadow flare to stuff approaches, strong ledgetrapping, exploitable recovery
To be specific, I'd guess he'll be top of mid at best, bottom mid at worst.
To sort my thoughts out a bit more on this, based on my current understanding of the char it seems his disadv is very poor, inconsistent KO potential and most importantly, it feels as though a lot of the behaviors his strengths encourage
are somewhat difficult or require commitment to take advantage of, e.g. jumping, shielding. He's got a lot of scary setups in theory, but I don't feel like he'll be able to organically punish the things his natural strengths want to make people do
as I've mentioned before, it's not good moves alone that make a good character, but so-called "complementary moves" that reliably punish certain behaviors, example being Snake's dthrow > UTilt reliably punishing what everything he does encourages: shielding
I don't think Sephiroth has this quality in his kit. He has very strong moves that reliably encourage those certain behaviors, but again, I think he'll struggle to synergize against his, let's call them "first-order strengths"
With first-order strengths being your neutral tools, essentially, and what exactly those tools encourage out of the opponent. Unsurprisingly, this is the same problems the Belmonts famously have: they force shield very easily, but can't do much about shield
Likewise, I think Seph will force jumps and shield very easily, but short of dsmash gimmickry, I don't see how he's gonna get past shields in a way that nets him stocks reliably
and it all boils down to the level of commitment required to take advantage of those behaviors. To call out jumps and shields is gonna be a commitment for Seph that loses him positioning
