I was aware of that, but it was just an easy way to say most of the time while I doubt there is any actual sitting back and testing and coming up with actual percents either for or against. The visual fidelity also changes greatly, so saying it's impressive and ambitious is a bit generous in this instance. 

Of course, but i think that goes without saying. If i wasn't talking relative to the Switch's hardware i'd have little positive to say about SMO's in-game tech :p Artistically it's excellent in any context, but its core technology is obviously quite sub-standard. 90% of PS4 games have lacking tech and they've got orders of magnitude more wiggle room.

What i'm talking about is the capacity with which they push their in-game tech, which is where Nintendo have historically been quite conservative (yes, relative to hardware and performance). They're frequently willing to trade large chunks of their render budget for relatively minor things, like pushing a 95%+ 60fps title to 100%. You can describe that as ambitious performance targets (and i'd agree to an extent), but that comes with an unavoidable cost. With SMO, they've taken a slightly different rout. They're allowing minor frame-rate variables, have a fairly large dynamic resolution range, distance based animation targets, and are making use of a variety of other image quality scaling methods (these all on-top of standard stuff like LoD fields).

If it was just the small frame-rate variability i'd agree it was sloppy for them, but together these all serve to smoothen out the resource curve between technically intense scenes and standard ones, which in turn allows for more technical ambition. The end result is something a decently sized step over MK8, Splatoon 2, and ARMS. Zelda is the only major exception, though how they compare relative to performance is more difficult to judge.

I don't like all the decisions they've made (i personally value image quality over in-game technical ambition, in the same way you likley favour frame-rate over it), but i appreciate the effort. They could easily have just used the same tech they used for MK8 and ARMS, but they opted to try and work slightly outside of their standard development style. The results aren't perfect, but i'm a fan of the attempt.

I think you're blowing this out of proportion. We're not talking about a game that regularly dips below 30fps here, nor one of those games that "targets" 60fps yet spends a lot of it's time in the 40-60fps range, like Bayonetta. We are talking about a game that achieves a 60fps flatline the vast majority of the time, and has a few minor, fleeting, and infrequent dips, much like Smash Bros Wii U.

The kind of game this is also needs to be taken into account; there's a reason open-ended/non-linear titles like this are almost always 30fps, it's a considerable technical challenge to keep frametimes within a strict 16.67ms window at all times when moving around a large detailed world where the rendering load can vary enormously from moment to moment and new assets need to be constantly streamed in and out of memory.

You say their attitude is now in line with other AAA devs, yet I guarantee you almost any other AAA developer tasked with making this game would have shot for 30fps.

Oh, I certainly agree I'm being pitpicky. Happily admitted.