My bad, I got my terminology wrong.

Like you say, Wii U could use tiling as well if it had to, but I got the impression from the tweets in question (which are months old, I have no idea why they're being posted now) that in this case they didn't need to.

Exactly, because they don't need to, developers need to do less work on the WiiU to achieve the same things that are done on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 via various work-arounds.

However the sad reality is, the WiiU isn't a powerhouse, it's more oft-compared to the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 rather than their newer iterations, which says enough about the console from a technical perspective.
But it is efficient, I'll give it that.

Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware that Wii U is not a technical juggernaught, and that it is closer to PS3/360 in power than PS4/Xbone. And I'm okay with that. I just think it has an edge over PS3/360.

Tiling is generally preferable anyway. Most deffered renderers in modern games use a tiled aproach on all platfoms. Frostbite, UE4 and Cryengine all use a tiled deferred renderer. Even forward renderers are moving to a tiled aproach. Forza Horizon 2 and The Order: 1886 both use a tiled forward renderer. The advantage of using a tiled forward renderer is that you can cull lights from individual tiles minimising the cost of having lots of lights in a scene while maintaning the advantages of forward rendering.

If they had wanted to tile on Wii U, they could have. Clearly doing it in one go was preferable for the game they were making.

Maybe in their case they did have a reason for not using a tiled aproach. But that doesn't mean that it is an inherently better aproach. Both have their specific advantages. Most of the industry seems to have moved to a tiled aproach for a reason.

I guess the bottom line was that 32MB eDRAM > 10MB.

The industry seems to go back and forth with tiled rendering.

The Dreamcast, Intel Extreme Graphics/Extreme Graphics 2/GMA 900/i740, PowerVR, ST Micro with the Kyro 2 and others all at one time pushed for tiled based rendering at the hardware and/or driver level.

Intel was a bit interesting, they actually managed to obtain almost-theoretical levels of bandwidth with it's Integrated Graphics thanks to the efficiencies that tiled based rendering brought with it, unfortunatly the rest of the IGP was pretty crap, so they were still poor graphics solutions.

Then it all died out for awhile, probably because the PC was advancing rapidly and the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 launched, so it was easier/cheaper for developers to ditch the tiled rendering so they can push out games faster.

Of course, things eventually changed, mobile came storming into the market with ARM Mali, PowerVR, Qualcomm's Adreno (Aka. Mobile Radeon) all pushing tiled approaches due to power and efficiency.
Then the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 simply got old, people still demanded better graphics, so tiled rendering was a solution once again and it seems to have continued to carry onwards, which is a good sign.

Lol, too technical for me to understand.

But Shin'en ALWAYS have amazing games that also push the systems graphically.

Heh, I remember when the Kyro II came out, I was all like "Damn right, these guys are gonna give nVidia and ATI a run for their money!"

lol nope.