What they are doing makes sense. Switch Online is so insanely cheap that it didn't make sense for a complete library of older games. Online play + cloud save + NES + SNES for $20/year is an amazing price. That's literally pocket change each month. And the fact that they have the $35/yr family subscription is even more of a steal.
Now we'll have a new pricing tier with more systems, which makes sense. Though the NES + SNES vs other systems separation is a bit arbitrary. And the question then comes are they going to add GB, GBA, and other systems to the N64/Genesis tier? Due to the very slow rollout this makes sense for the current system, changing the current lower tier would be confusing. But I would hope with the launch of the Switch 2 in a few years they will use that as an opportunity to redo the subscriptions. Maybe online play + cloud saves for $10/yr for that odd person who has no interest in playing old games, and then $60/yr bundle for that plus GB,GBA,NES,SNES,N64,Genesis (DC?? GC?? others??). But for the rest of this gen the original tier plus a more expensive premium tier makes sense as long as they keep adding games and systems to it.
Personally I think it'd be really cool if Nintendo eventually make the retro games subscription device agnostic and just turned it into a general service. While that would take away a little bit of the value of buying a Nintendo system, most of the value is in the new games, probably not any people who buy or wouldn't buy Switch based on the retro games Online subscription. Then they could charge maybe like $80/year on devices and $60/year on Nintendo systems for the service. That'd probably add a few billion dollars to their annual revenue if playing a huge assortment of old games/systems was as easy as having a laptop and a gaming controller and buying a Nintendo membership.
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