If your point shifts from "the focus and possibilities of Ultimate were narrowed too steeply by an early release" to "look how much I have to pay for DLC", you've basically dropped one argument and picked up another. Because MSRP and possibilities aren't at all the same thing.
My contention remains that DLC rectified the limited possibilities of base's reduced newcomer amount by providing a dozen original newcomers, bringing the character count above the previous peak. It's not like with a later launch, they would've allocated the budget to a fleshed out adventure mode.
The point was that getting more content later was not a replacement for getting the most and best content we could have had in base. Once the resources on base were spent, they became a sunk cost that could not be recouped by DLC; we could have gotten the exact same amount of DLC as we got with a better base game released slightly later in the console's lifespan.
Even if I were to concede that the DLC "rectified the limited possibilities of base's reduced newcomer amount by providing a dozen original newcomers," it still could not do that without ballooning the cost of the finished product, in which case it is absolutely a failure that they were unable to deliver a suitable amount of brand-new content at the standard and audience-expected Switch game MSRP.
While I may have gone on a bit too much when emphasizing the price hike of buying the so-called finished Ult product, the argument is not totally disjoint from the previous one. The cost and the possibilities are directly related because the possibilities each have a cost. More brand-new content in base would have come at the expense of some of the other design and development directions they chose to take instead of that brand-new content, but for me that cost would have been worth it relative to instead having to pay significantly more of my dollars on DLC in order to get that same satisfactory amount of new content.
But I will not even concede that the DLC rectified the newcomer situation or other issues I had with base. DLC additions are simply overall different in nature relative to the base additions, for one skewing more heavily toward third party crossovers. They're not the same as what usually fills out the back end of a base game content pool. In which case I feel that a noticeable amount of new content items could have permanently missed their chance at least for Ult. And there are other items besides the newcomers to mention, such as the pitiful selection of brand-new stages; the DLC indeed added new stages, but directly tying them all to newcomers certainly kept the possibilities severely restricted. And, as I said before, we could almost surely have gotten the same or a comparable amount of new content as DLC even in the scenario where they take a different direction for base.
And to feel shortchanged by Ultimate's base, even with its limited pool of newcomers, would put you in a minority wherein that opinion won't make many waves. Same with DLC actually, considering the quantity of content that came in a pack. People do feel it's all quality, and people do feel it's fairly priced.
I mean, I am well-aware that I am in a minority on this. It's okay. I recognize that my stances on the values of EiH, third party additions, and DLC in particular are not the most popular within the fanbase.
And, really, it's not the raw counts of characters, stages, etc. that make me feel "shortchanged" or anything (although the proportion of the content that was old and rehashed I did and do have an issue with). But self-inflicting the avoidable development stresses from having to get Smash on the Switch so fast and devoting all efforts to ensuring EiH could happen I did and do disagree with. I do think the possibilities for a more diverse set of brand-new contents was hurt by those directions taken, to a degree that was not and could not realistically be wholly rectified by DLC.
