At least it's still just $40 on the eShop without a sale. I personally wouldn't care, because I download all of my handheld games anyway.

Why the fuck has Nintendo stopped producing it? That makes no fucking sense...

Haven't you heard? Nintendo doesn't like making money.

Nintendo seems to like putting their games in short supply. They also live maintaining a high retail price. At least you've got download but any other game this old would $20 by now at a decent store

A bit odd that Nintendo would let a major title like OoT go out of print, but they do their numbers and if sales have presumably been tapped down to residual sales, it probably makes more sense to stick to DD. They can always do another retail copy run at a later date if the demand is there, or they want to do some sort of re-release.

Disney used to let their classics go out of print on a regular basis as a marketing tool to drive sales and films that went out of print saw a rise in aftermarket prices, so this is hardly a unique situation, not that Nintendo announces when they plan to let one of their games go out of print (it's not a marketing thing for Nintendo, they just let games go out of print).

Annoying? A bit, if you just bought a 3DS and are building a library. If not, It was available at retail price for quite some time. No one is required to keep something in production forever.

Who knows; maybe another production run is already in effect and individual sellers are simply trying to take advantage of the temporary lapse in availability.

Zelda/Kid Icarus and many other first games are out of production in physical form. Of the over 2 years games only MK7 - AC NLeaf and NSMB2 are still often and always in store. Not even SM3DLand is often available.