Wright said:
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Independent and indie are two different things. The word "indie" comes from "independent", but they're not the same. Indie developers aren't connected at all to publishers, they fund their own development and then a publisher might handle distribution. Independent studios that aren't indie get their funding from publishers. Game Freak gets pretty much all of its game development funding from Nintendo... but they aren't actually owned by Nintendo. Shin'en has made quite a few games for publishers - they're independent, but not indie.
The alternative is for "indie" to lose all meaning, since the only thing that "independent" means is "not owned by a publisher"... and even then, the term "publisher" becomes too lose, since, for instance, Mojang publishes its own games.
Anyway, I really should put some actual on-topic stuff in here. I'm not surprised that Shin'en would say this. They're one of the non-Nintendo developers that has worked most closely with Nintendo's hardware, with the only others that come to mind being ones with games being published by Nintendo (like Platinum Games). I think that certain games are showing just how deep the system could go (not showing the depth, but that it can go a lot deeper than people think) - Zelda U, Bayonetta 2, and Xenoblade X all hint at it.
Of course, if the system weren't capable of much more than what we've seen so far, it would fly in the face of our experience with every gaming console ever made (except maybe those that came prior to the NES, and the Virtual Boy and other very-short-lived systems). Every console has seen a rather dramatic jump in quality between start of life and end of life games. If we were to suppose that the jump seen on the 360 were to be replicated with the Wii U, we'd probably see the Wii U get to somewhere around the level that the Xbox One currently achieves (of course, the XBO would also improve in that time, so it's a comparison between start-of-life XBO and end-of-life Wii U).
