While I am in the mind that this storage card thing by Nintendo is a good idea, at the time when disc were starting to be used (first on PC) they were the best thing for the industry at the time. Nintendo cartridges back on SNES and N64 made games expensive and were limited in space. Since then technology has become better so we can get storage cards which hold a lot of data but they are still more expensive, this is the only issue. Discs are still a lot cheap for manufacturers... well, not cheaper than just hosting data on a server.

I suppose I should explain myself better. I'm talking mostly from a hindsight point of view. They aren't durable and are prone to scratching and becoming unreadable. The less scratches the better, imo. I'm very OCD about scratches on discs

If it's a case of durability, then yes, cartridges will always win. Even harddrives can fail, I think my snes cartridges though, still going.

Cartridges today have so many advantages for optical media, so if anything, I'm glad the Switch will be using them.

Great.

Disc or cartridges I'm all for physical!

As for the NS specifically, well first and foremost the NS is a handheld so you don't want to carry large objects. (The NS itself is large enough as it is) So using cartridges are perfect for handhelds.

Cartridges/memory cards have always worked well with small devices.

That wa salways the better technology, these optical disc only won for a while because they were cheaper. For mobile gaming optical discs are horrible.

Nothing to really "feel" about it.

If you're going to have a portable form factor, you can't have discs. It's pretty much that basic.

Yup.  Cartridges were a given the second we saw that it was a tablet console.  I will say though that cartridges and the rumors of no region locking are the two things I actually like about the NS.

Carts are great, but price and storage space become a concern.

Some visual apects may be scaled back to fit in smaller carts.