A few things.
First: He said most characters would be unlocked through subspace emissary. This was misinterpreted. What he was saying was that was the way most of the unlockable characters would be unlocked, not that more than 50% of the characters in the game were unlockable.
Second: All characters to this point have not been unlocked in Subspace Emissary. Marth was unlocked by beating Classic Mode on normal. Wolf, the only missing character, has yet to be unlocked as well.
Third: The character list (seen here: http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/2228/rosterthusfaral8.jpg ) is completely out of space except for one spot. This is pretty important, because when that one spot is filled by Wolf, in between Dedede and Lucario, the list will be pushed to the right, Bowser down to the bottom row, and EVERY character will be lined up perfectly by franchise. Do you really think this would happen in an incomplete list, and if it would happen in an incomplete list, why didn't the list ever line up by franchise before?
Fourth: It's just too much to ask for the 35 character roster to be coincidence. Every single character, even down to the unlikelies like ROB. Clearly there was real insider information here. You guys may not have used the internet before Melee, but I did, and the full Melee roster was revealed on gamefaqs months before release as well. No one believed it though because they thought Game & Watch was ridiculous (Similar to R.O.B.'s effects on the perception of this leak).
The rules of Melee do not apply to this game. You know why we got less surprises? Because we sacrificed surprises for hype. That was the purpose of the dojo. We were given the privilege of massive amounts of pre-release information about this game, but you don't get benefits without sacrifice. The sacrifice in this case was the surprise of the newcomers, most of whom were revealed on the website.
The character increase in this game was 1 more net gain than Melee was to the original Smash, but because 4 old clones were removed, it was actually a total of 15 brand new characters, and 16 if Toon Link turns out to have a different move set from Young Link. The issue is people simply had unrealistic expectations for the amount of characters who would be in this game. I have been predicting 35-40 for good reason... because it's about the same increase that Melee was to Smash 64. However, IMO we got a lot more quality for our quantity this time, and I wish others could see that rather than constantly demanding more out of this game.
