Generally I think Ultimate had the right idea prioritizing some of their newer successes for DLC that had missed the boat. In this case I decided to swap out Pyra and Mythra from FP2 for Three Houses, which I think would have made the latter less controversial since the dust would have settled / Xeno 2 and ARMS would have gotten their dues. I do think Min Min was the correct choice and I swapped Byleth for the more popular and IMO more dynamic Edelgard. With the inclusion of Edelgard we have all three components of the weapon triangle represented through individual characters. Byleth's implementation of this never quite sat right with me and I would have rather seen it manifest organically across several fighters like this.
New third party additions are Doom Slayer and Travis Touchdown. Both M-rated guests but I feel they bring quite different flavors along with them. Doom Slayer is brought in to represent the FPS genre. It's important to me to represent a good spread of game styles across this selection... this sounds arbitrary, but think of it this way. We all have different favorite genres, and game styles that click with us more than others. And with each new style of game comes a fresh new way to represent that unique gameplay intuitively in Smash. Through this roster I've represented horror, puzzle, sandbox and FPS games through Jill, Arle, Steve and Doom Slayer respectively. I feel like this has been a bit of a shortcoming of our real roster and I hope I've done a good job spreading the love.
Travis is a character who IMO had just about everything going for him at the time. It still makes me upset he got the shaft. He's a bit of a relative smallfry, but NMH has always been something of an honorary Nintendo title and NMH3 was being highly promoted as a Switch exclusive. Travis has so much personality and I'd love to hear the way he quips with other fighters and breaks the fourth wall. So Travis gets to slot in partially as a guest, and also partially as a "promotion" for the release of NMH3 since this is a series Nintendo has a fair amount of stock in. I wish he got his chance.
Honestly, kind of underwhelming that everyone needs to end on Sora, I would have liked to see the ways we all uniquely choose to cap off this journey with our own heavy hitters. Initially I had Sephiroth slotted in here and had no plans to add Sora, but I'm going to have to snub him now. The rest of this lineup is a bit too diverse for me to feel comfortable removing in his favor. So Steve stays because he's still a no brainer, and Sora is here because I guess he has to be. Wish I had more to say about that.