I get your point on the Wii Music/Bully comparison.  And yes, crap movies do make money when good (even great) movies often barely eek by.  (I'm also formerly a pretty big movie nerd, but I've pretty much abandoned my movie-love and vastly increased my gaming hunger.)

I'm wary of comparing sales of PS2 games to GameCube, however, and usually would prefer to compare GameCube to Xbox which had very close overall sales numbers (with the Xbox leading by a mere couple million).  In that scenario, the Xbox still maintained better sales and support where 3rd party companies are concerned.

The Wii reaching 85 million should've been healthy for 3rd party devs but it still wasn't, except in rare cases.  Hit franchises still struggled on the system.  The casual audience doesn't seem to know a quality gaming experience from a throw-away iPhone app, so they didn't know to support, or expand to, what some of us would consider hardcore or "real" 3rd party video games.  And the Nintendo fans... as is typical, pretty much just bought Nintendo stuff.

I do see how Cafe, with it's power roughly in line with PS3 and Xbox360 could manage some better ports of 3rd party games--like Call of Duty not being downgraded in any way, but I both see the support as slow to catch on, and quick to move away when the next Xbox and Playstation launch.  

I firmly believe there are still treasures to be found in the Xbox360 and PS3's respective hardware, but I'm not kidding myself--while I love that this generation has legs (and it should), the limits of both systems will become far more apparent within the next two years.  When Sony and Microsoft launch their next consoles, those limits will be left behind--except in Project Cafe--which will then be, last-gen tech.

I don't think they're actually doing anything to attract a "core."  I'm really not even certain what that means, like, is Nintendo trying to convince hardcore gamers on the Xbox360 and PS3 that Cafe is worth a purchase?  Or are they just trying to appeal to their own personal "core" consumers?  

Surely by now they must know they'll never be a company that will appeal to serious gamers, as in, Nintendo will never be seen as the place for hardcore gaming.  Back on the SNES, they certainly were.  The GameCube tried to be a hardcore machine, but still sold below comptitors.  Hell, I think if the Dreamcast hadn't died early, it probably would've outsold the GameCube in the long run.  In two years, it managed to sell half what the GameCube took 5 years to do.

I don't think Nintendo does "logic."  There's zigging and zagging and then there's Nintendo.  We can't even call it "zogging."  It requires a weirder word.  Like "splortch" or something.  Zig, Zag, Splortch.  Cafe sounds like it's essentially in the same league, technologically, as the X360 and PS3.  I mean, if you don't think Nintendo would launch a system that would essentially be considered "last gen" for another four years, keep in mind that the DS, Wii, and even 3DS are largely "last-gen" technology.

I like the 3DS and it is powerful and all, but let's face it--it's core processor isn't that much more powerful than the PSP (with the exception that unlike the PSP, the 3DS has a GPU rather than running everything off the CPU).  Aside from the 3-D aspect, pretty much everything else the 3DS does isn't a revolutionary leap in any way.  Limited motion controls, gameplay involving the camera (PSP did it), the wi-fi, and touch-screen, etc.  It's damn near last-gen tech... for another four years or so.  

To be fair, I would really love Nintendo to be the center of gaming again.  Despite their cruelty to 3rd party companies on the NES, the industry thrived incredibly when the primary systems for all types of games were the NES and SNES (yes, the SNES shared that glory with Genesis).  

But I think they've been too long out of the mindsets of hardcore gamers.  I know that, myself, as a hardcore gamer, I found my Nintendo love wane immensely as I realized that the stuff I always want to play is on the Xbox360.  There was a reason I loved the GameCube, and that was because it was such a hardcore gamer system.  It had 3rd party support, it had multi-platform games, and hell, it even had excellent Dreamcast hold-overs like Ikaruga and Skies of Arcadia.  

The systems where sales and survival were overly dependent on Nintendo's core fanbase have never been favorites to me.  The N64 was the first time I purchased a non-Nintendo system (the Playstation), and this generation, besides my general game collecting hobby exploding, I pretty much abandoned the Wii for my Xbox360.  The Wii was dependent on casual money and Nintendo fans, as evidence by an obscene plethora of Mario games.  Cthulhu forbid they make something other than Mario for once.  They have RPG's and adventure games in their past.  Like Star Tropics and Mother/Earthbound.  Do they really need to fill that genre with more Mario stuff?  Seriously.

But we'll see.  Strong, though unproven rumors about the power of Cafe are one thing.  E3 will be another entirely.  If they really want core gamers and to jump-start the next generation, they can't be making a Playstation 3.1--they need to make a Playstation 4--before Sony makes a Playstation 4 (this is an analogy, by the way--I don't really expect Nintendo to make a system called Playstation. I know, it should be obvious, but I'm sure you know how people on the internet are).  

I'm pessimistic on Project Cafe right now, but I'm still a Nintendo fan and eager as hell for E3.  

This is common sense.  Do people really believe the company waits till 6-12 months before launch to decide they want to build a new console?!  Get real!  Also, 10 yr lifespan for PS3/360 doesnt mean we wont see PS4/Xbox 3 for 10 yrs from their predecessors.