You completely lost me at the notion that Sakurai would plan ahead for DLC to make decisions for the base.
Ok. Though this has already happened. I'm sure Sakurai didn't just forget about the third-party costumes from 4 when bringing all the others back in base. The plan was to offer them again as DLC. And, I mean, Lloyd's wasn't re-released until the penultimate wave, deep into DLC.
Even past that, and with the benefit of retrospect, I believe the cost of securing Cloud for base to ensure EiH was providing another FF character as DLC with whom all the new supporting content could drop.
Regardless of that suspicion, I think this is nevertheless something that will only become more prevalent the further Smash shifts into a design of a more limited base and a more extended rollout of DLC. As the amount of the game which is DLC increases, the more it will be accounted for in earlier stages.
In fact, I think this is absolutely something the dev team will encounter when they approach the existing third-parties to relicense the characters. Whether that be through some third-parties being highly preferential to being DLC and the back-end that entails (likely the reason the third-party costumes were sold again), with Nintendo not dying on the hill of trying to replicate EiH and acquiescing to post-launch, or through them licensing, for instance, Sonic, Bayonetta and Joker at all once for expediency, but waiting until DLC to actually develop and drop some of them.
But if you don't believe some of these things are planned very far in advance, especially when the plan to have DLC now exists, presumably, from the beginning, I'm not going to convince you. That's fine.
