The problem here is that people are asking the wrong question. It's not a matter of taking a character in isolation and evaluating whether they have the merit to return, because the majority of the roster will have a reasonable argument behind them for coming back. Yet nevertheless, many of those defensible characters with perfectly sound arguments won't return simply because the finite resources didn't extend to them, and others were more highly prioritized.
The question that needs to be asked is where does this character rank in terms of priority? And there are some obviously more expendable choices, and some obvious safe choices, but like you said, a good number are somewhere in the middle. And we're not going to reach consensus on that rank.
But that's not even really the point, to get some agreed upon ranking. It's just to frame the premise more accurately. Less on whether x character has what it takes to return, and more on how they look next to other characters in terms of who would get priority.
Haven't I been arguing the whole time that characters need to be considered relative to each other rather than in a vacuum?
I was just pointing out that, like you say, it's going to be very difficult to achieve consensus on the middle tier, so naturally arguments are going to skew more towards those characters staying, because most people want them to stay and it's difficult to argue that they'd be veteran #50 vs. veteran #40.
Doesn't mean the discussion is pointless, doesn't mean you can't have your own personal rankings or opinions on it. Just explaining why, even for people trying to be objective, most of the arguments are going to skew towards characters staying, with some acknowledgment that they might not.
I mean, I do think we should be
trying to dig deeper into who's actually in the upper middle tier and who's on the lower end, and we should be doing our best to frame arguments in terms of priority. Just acknowledging the difficulty.
For the record, I do keep my own rough priority list on hand because it helps a lot when posting; I think making their own is a good exercise that everyone can do (both how they would set the priorities and how they think Nintendo would).
Like, if you look at the Mario series. I've seen arguments made for the return each character. Though the two who seem to me more likely to be cut are probably PP and Doc. However, if we get three cuts? Four cuts? That's entirely possible, and yet it would verge into characters people could make very good arguments to keep. Sometimes it's going to be a matter of being entirely qualified, just not being prioritized.
True, the question of who from Mario would be ranked lower is a relevant one to ask. And indeed we have meaningfully discussed that question several times whenever the likes of Rosalina and Bowser Jr come up in the thread.
But that's also not the only relevant question for those two. Even if they're the next-lowest-ranked Mario characters, they're still Mario characters, and saying they're ranked lower then MLPB is not really saying much. So you still have to compare them to everyone else outside Mario, since they probably won't set quotas for the number of Mario veterans.
