I doubt they're doing this for hype. You need to remember that Nintendo likes money. So satisfying demand is their worst case scenario. It's cheapest for Nintendo to produce just enough units that people won't riot and storm their HQ. If Nintendo ever produces just a single unit more than people would buy CEO heads will roll.

That's why the virtual console is so bad. The more games they make available digitally, the more digital copies they will have left over. Completely wasted money on precious and expensive bits.

I didn't mean to compare, just saying that Nintendo can't do everything.

Since you say you work at contract manufacturing, how does the process work? How does a company just put out like 5 million units at once (for example) as a first shipment?

Yeah, the sad part is I would have really liked to buy the SNES classic because of how convenient it would be to have all those game in one place, but with how Nintendo does things I'm becoming less and less interested in their systems as a result, which is a shame.

Why buying an overpriced (for the limited things it can do) object that can only play a limited number of pre-installed games when you can play almost every old console game with emulators on PC or on cheap and versatile Android devices?

https://www.google.it/search?q=ouya+snes+emulator

To the average consumer, and perhaps even most enthusiast gamers, emulation is like black magic.

I guess it's a good thing I never intended to get this, or else I'd be pretty frustrated myself.

Well there is obviously a ramp up time.  I'm sure the decision to go forward with the SNES was made sometime last year when it became obvious to Nintendo that their was high demand from their retro consoles/games.  I'm sure it is probably the same board being used that was used for the NES Classic (which it is kind of funny that the processing power of the board is better than the 3DS). 

So what has changed?  Basically just the outside plastic shell which I'm sure the molds were complete on those within a small time frame. 

New product you have protoruns (prototypes) to try and work all the kinks out but since the board probably didn't change then there is no need for protoruns unless they changed contract companies, moved it to a different factory or expanded it to multiple factories.  They could expand it to more contract manufacturers (there are shit load such as Foxconn, Flex, Jabil, etc).  This board probably is very basic and easy to produce compared to other boards such as some server boards so expanding it to multiple factories shouldn't be too hard and protoruns at those factories would be less than a few weeks considering the board isn't that complex.  If the board was complex or new design then a protorun can last months or even up to a year trying to work the kinks out but that isn't the case for this instance.

After protoruns are done they then go into a ramp up mode.  That can follow with working 24/7 using either 2 or 3 shifts.  This ramp up mode can go a few months or more but if I had to guess they should have been in full production mode by no later than early Spring of this year.  They should have millions of these produced by now. 

Tell me all about those shared components between the Switch and the SNES Classic. I'm not sure what's worse, people trying to defend Nintendo or the actual situation itself.

Or people that don't have a clue about manufacturing.  They act like Nintendo's hands are tied behind their backs.

Very true. I understand that Nintendo can't outbid Apple for components, hence why they're not able to produce more Switch consoles. It's a very rare situation. Nintendo choose to produce this number of units knowing that it would be extremely difficult to get. It's either that or general incompetence.