I am actually surprised that no one has pointed out that before announcing the release date for the 3DS Smash Bros game, Sakurai actually already explained why the delay happened. He specifically stated on the fact that they were giving a lot more time for the Quality Assurance team to find bugs and fix them. AKA they most likely found something last moment that needed to be fixed and delayed the release date to make sure it was as polished as they wanted it to be.

I can still hope!

Sakurai said during the digital event "We're fast approaching the sales date of the 3DS version. The game is almost complete but of course there are an astronomical number of variables in a game like this. We have to be sure we put enough people on the debug team and test it correctly. Thank you for your patience."

So to me, that means the 3DS version is delayed because they've thrown all their resources into fine-tuning and balancing the characters, items and enemies. These will be the same across both games - only the modes and stages are different.

To me that means that a delay for the 3DS version is unlikely to have too much of an impact on the release date of the Wii U version.

Yeah, that was the thing I was talking about.  I feel like very few people caught that given how almost no one brought it up except for you and me.

Honestly I did wonder about this - in fact it was the first thing I was concerned about after seeing the 3DS version delayed and still no specific release date for the Wii U (even though they do now say "Holiday" rather than "Winter"). But I have to hope that it won't be delayed to 2015, since that would be disastrous for Nintendo. As far as I'm aware that would leave them with NO big Wii U game for the holiday period, and surely Nintendo can't screw things up that badly...

Except that the release window was adjusted from "winter 2014" (Dec '14-Mar '15) to "Holiday 2014" (Nov '14-Dec '14)

A delaynis not an option in my opinion. They need this to be done, wiiu does.

You have to see it from Bamcos standpoint. As the developer of the games, they want the most profit out of it. Moving the 3DS-version a bit more towards the holidays to secure a holiday-release of the WiiU-version seems like a good decision in this line of thinking. Also they would have probably announced the delay of WiiU-version too. Otherwise they have to disappoint later again.

I doubt it. The release window changed from Winter 2014 to Holiday 2014, which suggests to me that it'll make its expected schedule.

I refuse to believe in someone that somehow wound up with a Justin Bieber avatar. It'll be out before Christmas.