Nintendo and 3rd parties *Formerly; Nintendo is f*cking up big times with 3rd parties*

[Mnementh]

Hmm, it seems all fall into place. I try to summarize:

1) You have a source at a third-party.
2) It is not EA, because you already said the ones with the 1st-party-game were EA but you keep the 3rd your friend works a secret.
3) It is associated with Playstation-development, because your friend had much more information about Sony and all infos about Nintendo/MS seem to be second hand.
4) Your friend seem to have a Playstation-bias, because all info about PS is good, while all info about MS/Nintendo is bad. With inside-info he would have good and bad things at least about the platform he knows the most: Playstation. For instance your friend didn't share the info, that the named 3rd-party-devs were inflated: http://www.gamrreview.com/news/89809/sony-revises-list-of-third-party-ps4-developers-down-considerably/
5) The canceled games were not actually canceled by Nintendo, one was delayed, one was canceled on all platforms, so no Nintendo-involvement.
6) Can't say much about the region-locking thing about Nextbox yet, but are we sure PS4 isn't region-locked?
7) The memory-part. You claim EA found that out. But I realized, that criterion builds a game, that looks better than everything 1st- and 3rd-party so far. So they probably have a non-gimped dev-kit. And that means EA has a non-gimped dev-kit. As Z101 explains, the dev-kits with lesser memory might be an early development-step and were later replaced. As dev-kits also have to be produced and are probably of limited availability. The PS4-3rd-party-news I linked at point 4 has the following: 'Likewise Gamasutra even reported that 17-bit, despite being included on the list "does not have a PS4 dev kit as of yet, although that's not for lack of trying".' So even Sony can't give everyone a dev-kit. Nintendo probably gave internal studios and devs with good relationship (Capcom, Ubisoft, WB) the good dev-kits first and others got first the older dev-kits. That would include EA, because their support for Nintendo-platforms wasn't that great in the past. But they get replacements as they are available, because it seem Criterion already have a good one, so now even EA has good dev-kits.

That seems overall the most plausible explanation of all this. Does that mean everything is good between Nintendo and 3rd-parties? Hell no, but it's not as bad as your OP seemed to make it. That seems to be a mix of overexaggerating negative stuff because of bias in your source and limited information aside from PS.