I think people really over rate Dante's chances of hitting Smash as a fighter, personally. I think they also under rate the chances of characters like Arthur.
It doesn't matter what angle I look at why a Capcom character would be chosen, Dante is not the frontrunner.
There are more popular characters (Phoenix, Leon, Jill)
More iconic franchises (RE/Monster Hunter)
Retro (Arthur, Haggar)
Iconic to Capcom (Morrigan, Chris, Chun Li)
Relevant to Nintendo (AA, MH, RE, Okami etc)
Promotional (Monster Hunter, Resident Evil etc)
His popularity with Smash fans only really came in during the first DLC pack. Dante's possible, but unlikely (I say this as a fan of Dante).
I would consider Regina in Smash an absolute blessed timeline.
While I agree with some of these, I disagree with other ones.
I wouldn't put Phoenix, Leon or Jill as more popular character than Dante. In Smash context? I could agree with Phoenix, but clearly RE characters aren't more popular than Dante. Before the RE spirit event I saw very few mentions of Resident Evil for Smash on Twitter. Most of the talks about RE seemed to happen at forums like Smashboards.
Outside of Smash? Dante seems clearly more popular to me. Not that the others aren't popular, but among these 4 Dante seems to have more star power in my eyes.
As for RE and MH being more iconic franchises, I don't think the use of iconic makes a lot of sense here. If you said bigger or more popular, in the sense of selling more and having a bigger audience, then yes. Monster Hunter being more iconic than DMC... I don't see it, honestly. I think you're dowplaying DMC history and influence here, to be honest.
Iconic to Capcom, I agree but at the same time, I don't know? I guess it depends on the person, but when I think about Capcom Dante clearly comes before Chris, for example. Chris comes from a bigger franchise, but if you put their default designs and show them to people that have never played RE/DMC/Marvel vs Capcom games, I'm pretty, pretty sure they would recognize Dante more. Probably the same with Morrigan, at least with people who isn't into fighting games.
Relevant to Nintendo, there's no discussion here. But Okami? Okami appeared on the Wii, Switch, and then there's Okamiden in the Nintendo DS. So far we have 3 DMC games on the Switch. So I don't see how Okami could be more relevant to Nintendo. Has more history? Obviously yes because DMC never appeared on Nintendo consoles until recently, but it's not like Okami was fairly pushed by Nintendo like they did with Ace Attorney or like they're doing with Monster Hunter, which in that case I could see them going for Okami first. I love Amaterasu and her game but I'm like 99% sure that between Dante and Amaterasu Nintendo would choose Dante.
Unfortunately I don't think Amaterasu is likely at all, she's more of a pipe dream in my eyes.
Promotional, I'm guessing you're mentioning RE because of RE8, but it's not like it's releasing on Switch. If that doesn't matter then we should also include DMC5 here, which is still a very recent game, or it's upcoming Special Edition, which releases literally in one month. Plus it's pretty likely they will port DMC4 to the Switch, I think. Maybe DmC too.