The clear lack of newcomers is surprising with E3 coming in a few months, but IIRC Sakurai said that the 3DS puts limitation to the roster. So 39 seems almost realistic.
No. The limitations he was referring to was stuff like Ice Climber(s). He never said having a large roster in general had any effect. He was happy with Brawl's size, but had no intentions shown on the interview that he didn't want new or more characters. He just wanted to properly balance it and hired Bandai-Namco to help do so. It's all technical issues, which having 8 Ice Climbers onscreen could be bad. This is why Olimar is reduced to 3 Pikmin.
He could easily have 45 without problems. And he got rid of those earlier issues anyway, showing off Rosalina & Luma/Olimar & Pikmin. The roster size being only 39 is still too suspect. There's more than enough space for a bigger roster as is. Plus, the cuts are mildly weird. Why would he cut a lot of reps straight from Brawl, when he was really proud of that roster? Why Lucas, Wolf, Ike(who can easily exist along Chrom), R.O.B., and Snake cut, I mean, the only ones not suspect are simply Snake(it's quite believable right now he wouldn't go for him due to various factors) and PT's last two Pokemon(Charizard's already there, and having 7-8 Pokemon with them and Mewtwo back is very high for Pokemon reps as is. Even if that was close to what Brawl might've had, if Pra_Mai was Plusle & Minun, otherwise, would've just been 7 with Mewtwo back).
R.O.B. is a very important piece of hardware to Nintendo, and always what got them and video gaming back into the business after the Video Game Crash. Cutting him is a bit too hard to swallow. Ike has no reason to leave, nor does Lucas, as they are both more than unique enough and definitely don't take up roster space at all. Wolf was the only one unique from Fox as is, making cutting him suspicious due to that alone. There's no replacement for him either. If Krystal was there, I might've found that halfway believable. It just looks completely too fake. Then again, the Ice Climbers typo(unless for some reason he wants to change their name...) pretty much makes it fake, along with the poor placeholder images.
This could be a
beta roster that was at one time planned out, but more came along. That would explain the placeholder images, and the typo on Ice Climbers(again, Sakurai changing the name might make sense, since it's two characters there). But as a final product, this can't be the final roster.
