It's understandable. The rooster is gigantic already, and the high amount of 3rd party entries makes all of them coming back more and more difficult. I don't think that Smash will go anywhere below 50 fighters anymore, however, so many will still come back either way

I could see Smash going one of two ways.  Either what Sakurai is saying is 100% correct or he's way off and full of crap.  

There are plenty of times out there when a franchise actually does peak, and the game never reaches the height of that one great game again.  Final Fantasy peaked a while ago, and 2D Mario peaked many, many years ago.  It could be that Smash Ultimate is like that.  On the other hand, sometimes a game is so great that it inspires future games to become even greater.  GTA3 is far above the earlier games, but it also inspired later entries to become even grander than that.  I can really see Smash Ultimate going either way.

In the same way that many are jumping off of the MCU after Endgame, maybe this should just be where it ends. I wont deny that I have been steadily losing interest in the series. There is always a huge wave of hype that follows each character announcement, and I will always be looking forward to them, but this might just be the last SSB game I buy. Might as well push the bar as far as possible and go out with a bang.

Ultimate is a miracle in and of itself. No need to try and top it in that department. Just refine the gameplay and gamers will return.

I feel like the best way to handle it is to keep the core Nintendo characters, but scrap any outdated Nintendo/3rd party characters and replace them with current gen characters.

I was going to say this too. 

Mario

Pikachu

Samus

Link

Kirby

Donkey Kong

Yoshi

Fox

This is the original 8. It represents what was popular with Nintendo at the time.

A new 8 would look something like this:

Mario

Link

Current release Pokemon

Current release Fire Emblem

Splatoon

animal crossing

Kirby

Xeno

Only focusing on what is going on with the current Nintendo/industry would bring in a lot of different and fresh IP's. Also I think limiting the each IP representation to 3 max would be a good move too.

Yeah I like that! Then add popular third party ones until you get  a manageable number. Then do it for another game the next time and the next time. Then they can do another ultimate where they have them all from those games plus some new ones. Like every 15-20 years have a Ultimate one, but the rest can be these smaller more focused ones probably Melee roster level.

...... Why cant they be cut? They're not relevant. I would personally spare fox just because he had a recent game, but F Zero and Earthbound are definite cuts. All third party should be cut and redecided based on relevancy and also being fresh; I dont think Sonic should come back. Hes Ran his course. Pick a new Sega rep.

  Lets just say the Smash reboot will feature 30 characters. Minus the absolutes like Mario and Link, they should be 30 NEW characters. Long running IP's need to have a reset button at some point and Smash is at that point in regards to characters and game design. 

The inclusion of Fire Emblem was at that time, catering to the Japanese. Marth was relevant over there. Marth is the OG protagonist and had appeared in multiple FE's at that point (I think the only FE protagonist to get multiple appearances) with Roy just having his game about to be released. I would not call relevancy an "added bonus" as there is no character minus R.O.B (who is just there to be the shock character) that at the time of their inclusion they were not relevant somehow. Developers are clearly thinking about this topic.

It's hard to believe, even though granted the quantity of characters is overwhelming, that people would rather have less characters, in a day and age we're living in with micro-transactions and loot boxes.