Even just doing it this way though is still a massive undertaking, there is nothing run of the mill about taking an open world game that struggles to hold 30fps even on PS4 and getting it to run on handheld device. Conversions of this magnitude are extremely rare nowadays, I can't even think of the last time the industry saw an official port this ambitious.

Yes, Capcom nearly did that. Then they realized that their greed wouldn't be worth the backlash and lost sales, so they changed their mind.

Anyone who uses the words 'card' and 'cart' interchangeably instantly loses credibility on this topic. The article you linked committed the very same mistake. Someone who doesn't grasp that there are big differences between cards and carts lacks the competence to write about the topic and is definitely not a credible source.

Not going to get involved in this debate, but comparjng N64 cartridges to Switch game cards is not really appropriate.  Very different technology,  very different fabrication process.  N64 cartridges were so expensive as to make selling N64 games at the same price as most single disc PS1 games literally unprofitable.  Switch game cards are not in that price range, it's more about eating into margins not erasing them.

Yes, Capcom nearly did that. Then they realized that their greed wouldn't be worth the backlash and lost sales, so they changed their mind.

Anyone who uses the words 'card' and 'cart' interchangeably instantly loses credibility on this topic. The article you linked committed the very same mistake. Someone who doesn't grasp that there are big differences between cards and carts lacks the competence to write about the topic and is definitely not a credible source.

No doubt about it, it most ambitious port to date when it comes to Switch - yet, and I said that before, I fail to see anything that is not a massive scaling back of right about everything possible...and that's what makes it run-of-the-mill port, in execution, maybe just on larger scale.

If there was custom art or something similar to what I've suggested then that would be really something that stands out from other similar ports.

But, all this comes down to how much money is publisher (not)willing to spend on the port, and I can't say I'm not somewhat dissapointed with CDRP on this matter.

No, that's not correct. The biggest reason for price hikes is the greed of third parties. From the beginning there has been no consistency in the Switch tax occuring or not. It has always been a per case basis with different publishers and those publishers who raised the prices banked on the ignorance of gamers, namely the belief that cards and carts are the same thing and therefore cards are a medium that is prohibitively expensive.

Legitimate cases of price increases, such as Dragon Quest Heroes 1+2 which launched in spring 2017 on a 32 GB card, have been the exception among games that had a Switch tax.

Even in 2019 we continue to run into strong inconsistencies, such as Dragon's Dogma launching on a 16 GB card for $30 while concurrently two other Capcom games (Resident Evil and Resident Evil Zero) are sold for $10 more each than on other consoles and the physical version puts only one of the games on a 16 GB card for $60 with the other game being included as a download code. Logically, this double pack should have easily been $40 in this form along with $20 price tags for both games on the eShop; alternatively, the $60 price tag for the physical version would have more than made up for the use of a 32 GB card with both games being on the card. That's not a problem with game cards, that's a problem entirely with Capcom.