I'll save time; Please don't say "it takes two years to license" if you're not willing to actually source it. At that point, it's not a believable quote. Memories are faulty.
Next, "you don't know how programming works" is a meaningless phrasing itself. No, I'm not an expert on it(I
am a game developer, but a beginning one). ...Exactly how does these words actually do anything to help me learn more about the licensing costs and the development time? Explain it properly. Like, I'm inclined to believe it, but it's at the end of the day, just "you're wrong". Not the more important "you're wrong, and this is where you made said errors".
Thirdly, it's hard to call that scummy when they promised pretty much nothing of the sort. Their words are "vote for your character and we
may put them in Smash For." Nowhere do they say "only after counting every vote". They also said said data would be used for future games. Both of these still holds true as statements no matter how early they used the ballot data. They in no way broke the actual letter or the spirit of the word. A single vote can be legitimate by all means with how vague their wording was. That said, I get what you mean, but they're a business first. If that data was only meant for Smash For, then it would be scummy, yes. Because it would mean the data would only apply to practically two characters at best, and be unused otherwise. Thankfully that's not the case.
Confirmation bias might be plausible, but I looked closer at the timeline. Cloud is December 2015 as a release. That means he'd have to have a bare minimum of 6 months. That means he'd have been started work on... at least when Mewtwo was fully released. So yeah, I clearly misread that timeline. It has nothing to do with some 2 year thing(which doesn't make any sense. DLC wasn't even decided upon that early. Maybe a year or a little more at best? This even explains the very small music set he got, along with the bare minimum trophies. Also, it took forever for the amiibo to get out. So maybe Bayonetta, but Cloud would've been in talks for at least a year(not 2) realistically. For that to work, he'd have to have started talks in April 2013. Uhhhhh... not likely. DLC wasn't even close to being considered just yet. Looking at when some more details came up even then, the only close to thing was much later in November 2013 when some talk related to DLC happened(namely confirming he didn't have plans for it at the time). Overall, none of the evidence suggests it, so until it's sourced, it's pretty unlikely DLC wasn't planned outright till very late in Smash 4's development, and seeing as how Lucas, Roy, and Ryu came out pretty fast, it clearly was more than Mewtwo behind the scenes. It'd still have been only at most a few months in, like November 2014 at best they'd have been started overall(besides Mewtwo, who was in works earlier). The point behind Mewtwo and the white lie is to see how well he can gauge it. Most likely to kind of see if it absolutely needed to be paid content(or how much the payment is necessary). They were going to release any way, as they'd be a little too far in to stop.
There, found a bit of a timeline; "the DLC we are releasing for Sm4sh is authentic, developed only after we finished working on the main game."
http://sourcegaming.info/2015/04/23/sakurai-on-dlc-its-all-about-making-players-happy/ At least for Mewtwo alone. So sometime before Smash 3DS was done would be the timeline itself. A few months before its release sounds about right. That'd give enough time for the Psychic Pokemon to be somewhat easier to show near when Smash For Wii U released. The fact they had almost nothing does suggest it had little work done(but we also had plausible 3 full characters, even if one is partially a clone in terms of development requirements) before release. Or at least was recorded while it wasn't far enough in to show any notable animations.
