The western markets completely ditched portables for the less effort- more money phones.
Basically they said: screw gamers, we are gonna get the easy money from fooling average people with F2P games.

Its a very sad turn of affairs, and i fear they may do the same for home consoles soon enough.

I was thinking the same, until I saw the ND for Japan. They have almost a game every week from now on until June-July. There are a lot of games coming, obviously, for Japan. :(

I dont like the lack of JRPGs tbh (in europe that is)

And I want physical copies so I have no interest in eShop verisons.

OP is right. 3DS has huge gaping holes in its catalogue. So many genres uncatered for.

Where are the racing games, shootersetc? Sadly its the western devs that generally make these and they've mainly ditched handhelds in favour of mobile. This is why handhelds are ultimately on the path of being irrelevant.

Thankfully the Vita has managed to at least get some scraps in these genres. But long term it doesn't look good.

It might have something to do with the fact that the 3DS is not a great market for third party developers and it's in decline. Last year the system moved about 56 million games and the majority of those were from titles published by Nintendo. I wouldn't be surprised if the 3DS ended up moving less third party software in its lifetime then the PSP did.

Western developers have NEVER been important to handheld markets. Why are they been linked to handheld decline?

Yeah, it's pretty odd I'm not interested in any retail game currently for 3DS. Though I am looking forward to some digital only games. E3 should add 1 or 2 at least for me.

Because :
- the audience is not there
- games are priced lower
- hardware is weak

I wrote an article on that not so long ago

https://ryuz4ki57inenglish.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/in-japan-the-illusion-of-nintendomination/

 -the audience is not there ⇒⇒⇒ 50mil isnt there? (or count 40mil)

- games are priced lower ⇒⇒⇒ What does this even mean???

- hardware is weak  ⇒⇒⇒ because Vita is doing so well?

Im not even going to bother reading an article that i already know is biased :-/

I wouldn't advise reading the article. It's laughably biased and essentially the message of it is "Yeah, Nintendo sells more software and hardware in Japan but......none of that matters Sony is better." It also makes a dig at "GOTY Bayonetta 2" not making the cut on the highest selling software, because that's relevant.