Tagged for later!

Oh, god, please tell me those are not all the characters that will be in the final game.
Hype down 40%

Awesome! Can't wait!

It does seem surprisingly low...

Everithing looks great so far, my only minor disappointment is the lack of "Block Fort" in battle maps.

Sad to see Dry Bones didn't even make it. I've been mainly using him for the DS and Wii versions.  Hopefully, there is a chance he still makes it in.  I am not sure who I will race with the most now if he isn't included.  Maybe Shy Guy or Lakitu?

The last ONM said that there are still unannounced characters in the game...but the launch is near and we still know only the same 16 characters...hopefully there'll be Dry Bones, it's the character I always used!

Gonna have tons of fun with this game :)

I look forward to getting it when I finally buy a 3DS

Honestly, I think Nintendo got lazy with the cast.
Where the hell are:

Baby Mario?
Baby Luigi?
Baby Peach?
Baby Daisy?
Toadette?
Dry Bones?
Diddy Kong?
Bowser Jr.?
Birdo?
Waluigi?
King Boo?
Funky Kong?
Dry Bowser?

Basically, half of MKWii's cast is missing, and instead of at least bringing back Petey Pirantha of Paratroopa from DD they bring us:

Metal Mario? WTF? Lazy.
Queen Bee? Boo!
Wiggler? Okay, that is cool.
Shy Guy? No ONE will ever use him.
Lakitu? Okay, kinda cool.

I'll still get it, but the cast has really turned me off.
You may say MKDS had few characters and was still a great game, but guess what? Times have changed, and we are 6 years past MKDS's launch.

At the end of the day it more depends upon the weight class of the characters retained versus the weight class of the characters dropped. Do we know enough to definitively say if one character will be more useful or not?