I just want Geno's status to be confirmed by the end of the year - doesn't matter if he won't be released for several months after the reveal, because then I'd know he was coming. And if he's absolutely not coming, then just go ahead and tell me - Geno's a pretty popular character when it comes to Smash, and they're confirmed to be aware of his fan demand. He's one of the last big old requests, so to have him just up in the air for so long is weird.
It doesn't take much effort to just make a tweet or something and say "We are aware of Geno's popularity, but unfortunately we were only able to give you the spirit/Geno's costume will be returning at this date for this price". It's a different story if you've got something you know a fanbase will be happy about and be willing to spend a lot on because they like it, so holding onto his reveal if he's in is okay. But if he's not in and you, as the developers of the game, know he's not in, why keep that hanging in the air for so long? And we've actually seen Nintendo try and keep people's Smash expectations down before with that 'No information about new fighters will be revealed' message they had on one of the Sakurai presents videos (was it Terry's?), so it's been done before.
It's the same thing as with Shadow and Isaac, honestly. Did they really think that waiting until the very end to confirm that popular characters weren't going to be coming was going to make people happy? I'm not attacking them or anything, I'm just wondering what exactly their thought process was on that in particular. They had the ballot results, so it's not as if they didn't know people wanted those characters.