Keep in mind these are consumer drives with extra retail markup on top.

Keep in mind these are 128GB drives, not smaller, cheaper 64GB drives. I used 128GB as an example of how much room there is monetarily wise for developers/publisher to maneuver.

So far I haven't seen any developers use carts as an installation media, but rather a streaming media, which tells me it's a Nintendo policy or restriction.
Nor have I seen evidence that developers are setting aside a chunk of NAND in the Switch 2's internal memory as a cache to obfuscate the cart speed issues.

Carts are forwards/backwards compatible with Switch 1/Switch 2.

Switch 2 has a very flexible media encoding/decoding block, they could use a highly compressed HEVC encode of the CGI clips to reduce file sizes and retain quality.

As for the cart speed, whilst that is potentially an issue...

StarWars Outlaws runs fine on a PC SSD which caps at about 500MB/s which is about the same speed as a Switch 2 cart, the issue isn't so much transfer rates, but IOPS... And the easy work around for that is for a cache on the Switch 2's internal drive or to install the game.

In saying that, StarWars Outlaws will run on a PC HDD, some quality textures won't load-in however, but it shares the same issues that Cyberpunk 2077 otherwise would, which also runs fine on a Switch 2 cart.

It factually runs better than the Playstation 4 Pro and Xbox One X.

They made their bed when they decided to abandon dedicated home consoles.

And look no further than Capcom's recurring releases fiascos of their Megaman Collections.

Despite the fact they could've gone with quite the small cartridge size, they still freaking opted for a partial download of games that were only a few MB big.

If this is the kind of cutting corners we're speaking here, even OP's solution wouldn't pass on their boards as viable.

Even with the 32GB card on Switch 1, hardly any publishers used it; instead we saw games like Doom or Wolfenstein release on smaller cards with a mandatory install, which makes them functionally no different from a game key card.

This solution would help for smaller games like indies, but AAA games these days are often in the ballpark of 100GB or more, so you'd probably end up back in the scenario of devs using a smaller card and having only half the game on there.

I think I see why Nintendo is in a position where they kinda need to raise their game prices…they shot themselves in the foot for the sake of making sure their products are as high quality as possible. Would be very nice if they at least offered a GKC version of their games at a $10USD price cut.

Cartridges are just an extinct format, the fact they even made it this far is kind of a minor miracle.

We weren't going to use carts forever, I think deep down everyone knows that. Whether this kind of situation arose this gen or the next gen doesn't really matter much.

But again for people who want to pay $100 per game, I say let them have special order collector's editions of games and have the worst performing versions of games.

The argument of having even slower carts that essentially are just there to transfer data onto the SSD I think is a waste. Even at $6 that's a lot more than 50 cents for a Blu-Ray disc, but really what is even the difference at that point versus downloading the same exact data online? It's not going to be any different than what's on a storage (effectively a "key") cartridge.

I wish they did. But even with Nintendo's impressively small file sizes and Split Fiction at about 73 GB (well below the biggest PS4/Xbox One and PS5/Series games), Switch's 230 GB or so of usable storage space would get eaten up pretty fast. Then again, PS5's 667 GB or so of usable storage on the 825 GB SSD configuration could get eaten up fast by game installs and downloads.

The other problem is Nintendo will still get shit from dumb people who don't understand the entire issue.

Like OK, say you offer a 128GB cheap ass 30MB/sec card, some people are going to think they can play the game from the cartridge itself, not understanding that they can't and then get upset.

Even here, only until a lot of the facts were given out in the past couple of weeks have people come to understand this is not a cut/dry simple issue like they thought it was. Most people were unaware the Switch 2 cartridges are significantly more expensive because they have to be significantly faster to even stay quite a bit slower than the internal storage.

By the way what happened to PS3 style partial installs?

It's not $6. Outlaws is 20GB, so fits on 32GB card, which, at those quantities goes for $1-2.

And as someone said, try downloading something for WiiU these days. You can't, for most of its library. Well, that's the point, so that you can insert your card/BD and play it whenever you like, even if you need to install it.