Unfortunately, hardcore Nintendo fans will not only forgive Nintendo anything, but also defend anything they do, which encourages the company's bad behaviour.

The people who defended Zelda being delayed to 2016 and showing a measly 13 seconds of uneventful footage of an area we'd already seen in the entire calendar year of 2015, case in point.

Based on what?

It's usually a wild swing of being mad to laughably crazy overconfidence. Remember this stuff when Wii U was unvieled:

Gauruntee some of the people swearing up and down that Nintendo better not abandon the Wii U will have their few days to pout about it, but then will see the NX, go crazy, and then straight into over confidence mode. 

common sense.

Common sense is to put on the NX. Not to waste the project on the Wii U because 10 people on a forum will be mad.

People prefer to embarass themselves with baseless arguments than admit their company is doing wrong.

Luckily for Ninty, most "hardcores" will "forgive" it if Zelda will be multiplatform, while most "casuals" and non hardcores in general won't have anything to forgive it for, they'll just be happy if Zelda will be on a console they own and they'll be happy too if other gamers owning other consoles will be able to play it. Only a very small minority will be pissed, even amongst hardcores: as few as they may be, they are at least in the order of magnitude of millions, while people that lose their sleep about exclusivity are just a few thousands very vocal forum dwellers, if they don't reach the tens thousands, they are less than 1%.

What pisses me off about delays is that is a common thing to do now in the gaming world. Why not wait until they have confidence on giving a date? Companies could show some footage of the game to their fans, but it's not mandatory to invent a release date. I guess it's because people would lose their minds if they're not given a release date, but I think it's a most honest thing to do. 

You realise that they announced Zelda U in January 2013!? And early announcement of NX game for NX would even more weaker Wii U sales in meantime. Again, business logic.

That's incredibly wrong. And dev kits distributed last year is standard dev kit time before launch.