That would be quite the undertaking though, and I'm not sure how financially viable it would be, especially the work that would need to be done in the original XC (and because these series do little more than reference each other, unless there is some underlying connection they will eventually reveal). But hell, it would be an awesome thing to see done!

I actually didn't know that.

Still, even if they had them during the Wii/DS era, they are probably gone. XC X probably started development after Xenoblade, which got released in 2011?
And so far they did assist on some Nintendo games, but that means that they don't have enough staff to develop two games like XC X in one generation. It's really too much for them.
That's why they need to increase their staff.

Not necessarily.  For XCX, it would only need to upres some textures and fix all the draw distance issues in NLA. 

XC would be a bigger undertaking, but not as big as it seems.  The folliage is surprisingly well done from a polygonal perspective as well as density.  Because of the techniques used for it, you could, again, mainly just increase texture resolution considerably.  Landscape polygonal detail is also pretty dang good.  Where the hard work would come in is smaller detail meshes (props, small structures, etc) and of course character models.  However, if the animations could still be used with the new models, that would save some time.  So it's still very much possible. 

Nope, in Wii/DS era, they have ~80 peoples in two team. In Wii U/3DS era, they were still there and get expanded, have ~120 peoples in 3 team( A & B in Tokyo, C in Kyoto). Team A(~50 peoples)made Xenoblade X for Wii U, team B(~40 peoples) made Project X Zone 1 & 2 for 3DS, team C(~30 peoples) worked on Super Smash, Zelda, Animal Crossing, Splatoon and other Nintendo games

I thought there were more issues to porting than that which is why the NX isn't backwards compatible in any form. Could be an architectual barrier which makes it vastly harder.

Where did you find that info? I checked wikipedia and it showed none of that. Actually, it said they have 94 employees.
That page is seriously outdated.

That paints a better picture now.
That being, seeing as Switch will be their main focus, i hope/believe they will be able to develop 2 games, at least, per generation.

Thanks for the info!

The biggest problem in porting is how integrated the game code is with the engine and how much of that engine was customized just for that game. The less integrated the code and the less customized the engine they had the easier it is port. Because unlike in the past where the game engine was remade for each and every game, the engines now a days are made to be a layer that stand inbetween the console and game code, so at its most basic all porting is divorcing the gamecode from an engine that is made for one machine and coupling it with an engine made for another machine. So half the battle for console makers with the third party is making a case in getting their tools (engines) made for their machines.

They helped in Smash too? Did not know that...

Still, they can and should get big enough to at least develop 2 games per generation.
Them helping out Nintendo shouldn't stop them from doing that.

It's like Retro: talented but not efficient enough.