No we weren't. This makes absolutely no sense. Why would they spread the pass over two years and release 4 characters in the first year.
Something I've mentioned before, but maybe not necessarily in this thread, is that the lengthy release schedule may not be "oof six characters takes so long", rather, "these six characters are ****ing nuts to develop". I specifically started thinking this way after Min Min - you have a character with more physical range than ever seen before in Smash, meaning of course that you cannot rely on a reflector to counter zoning tactics. On paper, this seems like "well make her slow" is the play, but what we got was a very neutral based character that focuses on a very "one-two" style, reminiscent of boxing. This was no doubt harder to balance than the easy path, because she has big range and isn't slow in the form of the Ram Ram, she has extremely beefy hits in the form of powered up Dragon and Megawatt, and when in advantage focuses on mixups and sometimes outright bait to maintain advantage without becoming rushdown.
At the end of the day, she's not very well loved or respected but there's a complexity to her that some people might be sleeping on. Undeniably, she faced a delay that might not have even been COVID-19 related. I don't think that I have to go into any great detail about the complexity of Steve. Sakurai has said enough about how much went into Steve and how much had to be changed peripherally to Steve to get Steve to work. If this kind of character is the norm for Fighter Pass 2, Sakurai and his team, when asked how long it would take, probably erred on the side of caution and essentially requested two years to get everything done,
just in case. Much better to overshoot and have wiggle room than to be caught with your pants down because Steve keeps breaking the game, or worse, some heretofore unseen character has
more complex programming involved.
Fighter Pass 1, we got in the course of a year because we saw things we already had seen. Meters, fighting game inputs, flare blitz, Fire Emblem. Hero was delayed, because balancing his spellbook was a chore... And this is something people tend to forget. In two characters of Fighters Pass 2, love them or hate them, we've seen mechanics that Smash has never handled before, and I doubt they're done with just "the monk with a high range stat" and "lmao put up a wall". If they didn't have to live through the same bull**** 2020 that the rest of us have had to live through, I wouldn't be surprised by a 4 character year, but at this point, 3 still doesn't surprise me. Could've been the plan past a certain point, to just move to a 3/3 schedule and make everyone think that was the plan all along.