Missed out on the whole "Ballot is fake" discussion a while ago, and my first thought is...
"So what?"
Bayonetta and Cloud began development before the ballot actually ended. Yeah, no duh. Did anyone actually believe that development on a new character would only begin once the ballot would've closed? We wouldn't have gotten a new character until late 2016 if that were the case. For being a fan voted poll the period in which it was open was extremely long and extremely sketch - not just because it's not optimal for development but because a large majority of traffic that this kind of poll would've gained would only be the most evident within the first few days of being active. Most people who voted for the character they wanted would have only done so in the first few days, unless you're one of those character loyalists who came back every day to vote for your favorite character, which isn't reliable as far as results go. There was always going to be an invisible cutoff period and it was always going to be incredibly early. Beyond that, having it close in late October feels especially more telling now given that the project outline for the next entry would've been proposed around this particular period.
On top of that there's no reason to believe that there was an ulterior motive in bootstrapping Bayonetta of all characters into Smash when the original game was only a modest success and the sequel was a financial dud for Nintendo months before the ballot was even in consideration. Who would realistically believe that this kind of ballot existed to push Bayonetta of all characters?
This is why I never believed for a second that Sakurai and Nintendo would come straight out and say that a character inclusion was ultimately dictated by the ballot. If the idea was to obfuscate a result it would've been far more believable to make the claim that Cloud was the ballot winner, and in fact, I'm convinced that his inclusion was pretty much foresight on their part. They mentioned that they'd been receiving plenty of requests for Final Fantasy characters (and bear in mind the ballot also asked you to list the series/game they're from), but that Cloud edged them all out. Why would they position Bayonetta as a "ballot winner", especially under such specific results, but not Cloud, who would ideally have been way more popular? And yet that's what they did - not only saying outright that she was the overall top pick, but that she even topped the charts in very specific regions.
Even setting aside all of this is the simple fact that being #1 on the ballot doesn't guarantee an inclusion. This is where that *realizable characters anecdote comes into play. I see no reason to believe that Bayonetta didn't have a significant ballot presence, and trying to argue otherwise to me seems like a whole bunch of looking for controversy, no matter how early she was planned. If the parameter data was patched into Smash that early but literally nothing else, it's equally fair to assume that they were hedging their bets based on the early ballot feedback because it's likely they wouldn't even have successfully negotiated the characters to include them. Between having to negotiate characters and actually make them, they can't just dawdle on it. Third party characters in particular take a long time to figure out.
