I do wonder though what are the other places we should be looking at.
The ballot has a lot of information of what could be likely to enter the battle.
I'll try and steer some direction; a bit busy at the moment, but, some ideas to help at what to look at,
-The Brawl and Melee "Polls" back when those were around; while they didn't have as much information, they've proven pretty true and all of those characters Sakurai knows about. I think that's a pretty big deal.
-Popularity for each franchise. For ex, Ashley (I have a feeling if she didn't get in as a Mii costume people wouldn't be crediting this as much), Masked Man is pretty popular in his own, there's tons of (more-so one-off) Kirby villains that are popular and shouldn't be discounted, etc
-Don't speculate only characters; if we start picking apart with at least Assist Trophies, we'll find closer to what we're expecting. I have reasons to suspect we're at least getting a Donkey Kong assist trophy this time around.
-I explained something about movesets before and I've done it a lot, but that's mostly pertaining to Echo's
-The only franchises that we should be heavily locked into any "Rules" are Pokemon, Xenoblade, and Fire Emblem since those are the flavor of the week/relevancy franchises and even then, TAKE A BIT MORE RISKS! Nobody, and I mean practically nobody, saw Lucina, Pokemon Trainer, or Greninja coming. Heck, nobody saw Pokemon Trainer coming
again.
-Third-Parties vs Supporting Characters vs Series that Nintendo owns without a character yet - They're three separate leagues and they each have their own problems but their own advantages. At this point, Third-Parties are what are most likely to get people who don't know anything about Smash playing, but there's also legal fees involving those.
-Consider this: We're down to the wire on characters. At this point, replace "Importance to the franchise" with "Who's going to please the most people"
Of course, the Smash Ballot is a big deal as well, but some of this can even be applied to the ballot. It's hard to say, compare a random Fire Emblem or F-Zero character's popularity compared to Waluigi, if that makes sense.
Like... all of the roster has been revealed. I don't know why everyone is going so safe. I guess it's fine if you want to try to play the "How close are we to the roster" game as a bingo.
(I do feel like "old man yells at cloud" sometimes but honestly, I do prefer the pessimism over Brawl's incredible optimism - It means even if all they show us is like, one new echo, we're all gonna be blown away)