I thought that the black Wii U looked pretty sexy myself.

Felt better in my hands as well. Joycons are a pain.

In fairness to the Wii U, it's library would've been considerably different early on if Nintendo had cherry picked Wii projects to put on it, like say if they held off on Zelda: Skyward Sword or Super Mario Galaxy 2 and quickly repurposed Xenoblade 1.2 and launched on Wii U with enhanced graphics. Switch lineup becomes considerably less impressive when you remove BoTW and Mario Kart 8 which are Wii U games.

The fact is too, it's not like Nintendo didn't have any strategy for the 3DS and Wii U launches ... what basically happened is they got burned hard by the casual audience abandoning them quicker than Nintendo ever could have imagined.

New Super Mario Bros. sold 30 million copies on the Wii. Nintendo Land was a high quality mini-game collection using big name Nintendo IP ... released in 2009 something like that would've sold 15+ million copies. Like 5/7 top selling Wii games are mini-game compilations.

There was no reason to think these games wouldn't drive Wii U sales. It was the same shit in their mind that was selling the Wii, and keep in mind these decisions had to be made in 2010 or so, at least two years in advance, in 2010 the casual market still looked OK, iPhone gaming was only just starting to take off (Angry Birds only came out in late 2009) and iPad had just come out.

Same thing with 3DS ... it's not like they planned to have a poor launch ... the plan was that Nintendogs + Cats would sell a shit-ton to casuals, the same way it had on the DS (24 million copies). They did not forsee how fickle casual gamers were and how quickly they would be abandoned by them in favor of Apple/Samsung devices. They trusted that crowd and got burned hard. 

I use the Pro Controller instead of the Joy Cons.

Yeah, but you gotta add another $50 to the price. I recently got a Switch because I knew someone who was wanting to get a PS4 Pro instead, I paid $340 for Splatoon 2 and the Switch which is a little over what I wanted to spend, but oh well I was going to get one anyways, he was wanting money, didn't pay full retail price for it, it all worked out in a win.

I'll jump aboard the pro controller when Xenoblade 2 comes out and I'm gonna be putting some real time in. My time with Splatoon 2 is a mixed bag. Great game but the button positioning on the controller isn't great (everything seems crammed together in the layout) and there was noticable lag which means I gotta scoot my couch or chair up to my Switch to reduce lag, get a chair out of the kitchen (smaller and wooden so easier to back and forth) or just play handheld.

It's funny you say that, because a lot of people were saying that those games wouldnt drive Wii U sales. I think its a failure on Nintendo's part for not being able to read the market. The very nature of those games would dictate that they were flash in the pans for a few years and people would lose interest at least enough to not buy them in the numbers they were initially doing. Hell you could just look at the software sales for those games on Wii they were dropping with every new release. Deca Sports, Carnival Games etc. sold less with every iteration

Yeah, the Pro Controller is expensive, but I can't imagine playing on the Joy-Cons now that I have it.

It's a nightmare, lol.

Games in general would have helped Wii U. They were sparce the consoles entire life cycle. If you like Zelda though, TONS of Zelda on the Wii U.