To stop talking about cuts for one goddamn second, who's one of the more sleeper pick newcomer choices, in your opinion? For me, it's Athena Asamiya.
We honestly don't really talk about cuts all that much here, and I thought our previous conversation was a pretty good one. But in any case, the biggest sleeper pick right now is an additional Splatoon newcomer that isn't Octoling. Be that the Squid Sisters, Off the Hook, DJ Octavio... personally I'm torn between the latter two right now, both have a lot of untapped potential.
On one hand, I feel like Off the Hook could operate as sort of a blend of Ice Climbers and Pyra / Mythra. Let you control who takes the lead for normals, while the other provides specials for assistive backup (ie NASB Angry Beavers, I feel like I keep citing this idea because I really love it). With a few moves that incorporate them both, but in essence you're in control of the one. This is kind of how I imagine Diddy and Dixie could have worked out. This could operate for either of the idol duos, although Pearl and Marina just have more dynamic personalities and designs to play with IMO, they read much clearer as "offense and defense". Pearl is obviously the more rough and tumble physical fighter, she'll swing around her microphone and scream in your face, and then Marina is the more defensive and calculated character with some zoning capability utilizing her turntables.
Meanwhile, Octavio could go a number of ways. You could have him docked into some sort of mech, a smaller version of his Octobot King or some variant on the little machines that Octarians ride around. See: MODOK in MVC3. Or he can just squirm around freeform like an octopus, like Shuma Gorath. I'm kinda preferring the latter lately, it would just be a really interesting type of character to see a moveset crafted around. Both he and the idol duos would be music oriented characters, something that particularly excites me, and they could handle that a dozen different ways if they wanted. In this case, and likely Marina's as well, you'd probably be dealing with record scratches and vinyl discs, soundwave attacks and so forth. In addition to extra fun playing with his unique design and utilizing his eight legs and suction cups.
Bottom line is there's a lot of great potential here, and I think they may go for at least one of them. Octoling is a pretty surefire bet, but with how prominent Splatoon is and how much series growth Smash needs to make up for since the development of Ultimate, we could easily see another character thrown in alongside them. Especially if Octoling levels out at a semiclone or some other lower effort role.