I'm pretty sure Camelot left Nintendo entirely around the time of the original Wii's launch
I don't know where you've been, but they made Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (2010), Mario Tennis Open (2012) & Mario Golf: World Tour (2014) across the past 5 years, and made We Love Golf for Wii in 2007.
I find it interesting that people are so quick to disbelieve 50+ character rosters.
I think this is primarily due to the fact Sakurai implied we shouldn't expect a lot of characters. His focus is that it's not exciting to just add new characters, and has said characters will likely get cut, and that Brawl already had "too many" characters.
So people use that as a guideline to not expect a huge roster.
You also have to look at what it implies. Say everyone from Brawl returned except for Squirtle & Ivysaur (for the sake of argument). That's 37 veterans. This would mean SSB4 is adding almost 20 newcomers. That's a lot of new characters.
HAVING SAID THAT... not that patterns are truly applicable yet, but:
- SSB added 12 characters
- Melee added 14 characters
- Brawl added 18 characters (or 16 if you want to be that guy)
- SSB4 could easily add 20 characters
But again, Sakurai's unpredictable and 'patterns' can't be truly established yet.