I think Aonuma's priorities are this
1). Make Nintendo a lot of money on the Zelda franchise
2). Make the best Zelda games possible
So if a proposal to use the Zelda IP comes up, Aonuma practically rubber stamps it. To him it's just a few dozen more emails and a few extra short meetings a month. What other time he has he spends on the big, new Zelda games like ALBW and Zelda U.
Aonuma justifies it all as 1). 'drawing inspiration' from the various games for the next entry. Which is sort of true, but really the answer is 2). making Nintendo and himself lots of money.
This is precisely why Zelda got delayed out from 2015 to 2016 and now to 2017. It had little to do with the completion of the game's development. TP Wii first taught him there's far more potential in a Zelda game on a new invigorated platform than a withering one. Skyward Sword really underscores the same point, it hardly sold any better Majora's Mask did despite the Wii having 3x the install base of the N64.
Aonuma also realizes that in terms of technical scope, the Zelda team unfortunately has a lot of catching up to do. Big reason for SS's poor performance should be obvious: it released at the same time as Skyrim and Arkham City. From that time onward, I'm pretty sure Aonuma put a lot of pressure on himself that the next home console Zelda should have as much technical scope as other AAA games on other consoles (regardless of what his other colleagues at Nintendo thought). HD / AAA development is something I'm sure Aonuma had wished he had transitioned his team to sooner. TBH, I don't think Nintendo probably even let him pursue that scope of development until sometime in 2013.
I predict NX launches in 2017 - not 2016
