I know that I'll get a lot of hate for this, but...
Why do people accept and defend the quantity over quality approach.
I don't care if echoes take 10 minutes to be developed.
If the roster had a more limited amount of characters without the unnecessary ones, there would have been more resources avaliable, that could have been used to improve the actual characters and the game itself.
Also, it would be better for the identity of the franchise, as a celebration of Nintendo's history and not as a sort of MUGEN where everyone is playable for the sake of it.
If we had less characters but every character was developed with more effort and made unique, then there would be a chance to have features such as character-specific minigames like Board the Platform and Break the Target, something that you can't have with more than 70 characters in the game.
I prefer a better game with less content than a bigger game with tons rehashed and low effort content.
People keep saying that they want more characters, but the problem is that having too many characters will only make the balancing of the game harder (echoes count too, since they're balanced differently!), and anyway competitive players will only use like 10 characters of the 70 in the roster (the high tiers).
Casual gamers don't even care, they don't care if Doctor Mario from that NES game is in the game as a fighter or as a costume, they see Mario and that's it... if you remove Dr. Mario, you don't even need to ask "why there are 2 Marios?".
None of the Mario Kart games ever had 70 characters, and I have never seen a casual gamer complaining that the game has too few choices.
Imo they should add characters to Smash only if they have some historical value to Nintendo and if they bring something original gameplay-wise; else, you can add them as costumes, so you don't even need additional balancing. also I have nothing agains cuts and I think some franchises would benefit of them, such as Pokèmon (cut the Pokèmons from past generations who aren't relevant anymore and replace them with new ones); as long as you don't cut the iconic ones such as Mewtwo... I wouldn't mind if they cut Jigglypuff and Greninja to add a couple of more recent ones.
Players should adapt more to changes and Sakurai should be less conservative. I wouldn't mind if a new smash doesn't add anyone but instead revampes the actual characters to have more accurate and updated movesets, even if they turn out to play nothing like their previous version.
I'm not saying that I don't want newcomers, I have my favorites too and support them, but I think that the quality of the game should come first.
This doesn't even apply only to playable characters... Items (I wouldn't mind having only 7 or 10 items in total but very well balanced and more developed), Music (what's the point of having all those tracks? Just make 1 track for each stage and try to make it the best to represent that specific stage), Achievements (go through the hell and ruin your eyes, nervous system, and body forever just to get all those Mii hats and 100% the game... just no), game modes (what's the point of having Smash Tour if it sucks? Just to have an additional mode in the game? As far as I know NOBODY liked it, just wasted development time and resources), and so on.