I addressed your underlined question in the opening post. Nintendo's biggest mistake this generation was allowing leaving huge drought at the start of Wii U's life. Nintendo can addresss this by delaying their huge games into next generation. 

As for the bold, I didn't imply these titles would save the system because of their brand power. Again, it's to prevent a drought for the system's first year. Momentum plays a big role in video game console sales and this generation is proof of that.

I think it is likely that animal crossing and Pokken Fighters will be 2016 titles, so no

I think that Nintendo spends more on their 2D games than most people are willing to accept. They have 2-3 year development cycles like any other game. I doubt the budget gap between 3D Mario and 2D Mario is very wide.

If you isolate Nintendo for the sake of comparison and arbitrarily decide to use the standard A, AA, AAA labels used for the industry as a whole then I suppose you might wind up with something like NES Remix being A, most 3DS games being AA, and most Wii U games being AAA. But those terms are meaningless when you have removed the context that defines them. In the larger picture, almost all Nintendo games likely fall into that AA bracket -- and the few that don't are legitimately A stuff like NES Remix or remakes. Hell, they put some decent effort into their remakes, so those might actually qualify as AA.

Nowadays AAA seems to mean 3 million+ sales are needed just to recoup developments costs. I don't believe that applies to any of Nintendo's games. Sometimes they are criticized for "playing it safe," but if they had been taking such enormous risks on Wii U software they'd be much, much worse off than they are now. Basically, it's a good thing they didn't assume that NSMBU would sell 25 million and give it a GTA-sized budget.

In the real meaning of the word, main-line Zelda games are unquestionably AAA.  It does not refer to budget but rather to sales expectations.  The "AAA = big budget" is something the gaming community made up on its own because they didn't understand the usage inside the industry.  Now, in public perception, it's come to mean "big budget", which is kind of a shame.  When I managed and did the ordering for a video store, I would get pre-order catelogs which all used this ranking system.  It's a retail tool to help understand what will yield a solid ROI.  Something like Just Dance, for instance, is a strong AAA, and I often saw Nintendo DS titles with that classification.

Even if we use the internet gaming forum definition, I'm quite sure it would still apply.  It's not like Nintendo pays in peanuts.  Zelda has been in development for a long time, and time directly equates to money.  It's open-world-ish, with lots of art assets and obviously a lot of technical man-hours.  It's going to be fairly expensive.

On topic, assuming the OP is refering to budget, I think there is a good chance Nintendo is no longer green-lighting larger projects for the Wii U.  Anything not already in full development will probably be suspended or possibly moved to the next console, assuming they're at a point where they can even begin software work.  It would be the most prudent course to take.

I expect Next Level have been given a big game to work on for the WiiU which will have been in development for a couple of years now, so I'd be surprised if that didn't release next year.

last one? highly doubtful

None of those were ever even confirmed in the first place.

Zero percent chance. Next question?

Hope not?

This.

Although I don't think games would necessarily be suspended for the Wii U; Nintendo has stated on a number of assumptions that they won't be releasing a new console until they feel they have given fans a good experience with the Wii U. 3 years of AAA titles wouldn't do that.

Bearing in mind that Nintendo likes 5 year console cycles, we may see their next console in E3 2016, and therefore they're going to need a big title to sell holidays 2016, as well as big games to announce at E3 this year.

That said, I do think Wii U development will be winding down as soon as they've solid specs for their next machine, although the biggest titles will probably come to both, a la Twilight Princess. A small handful of cross gen titles (possibly Metroid, Pokken, SMTxFE) would stave off a drought on their new console, whilst diminishing the risk of alienating Wii U owners.