Maybe not. The harder part would be trying to make sure people have like two free hours. I'm sure we have plenty of folks who would be willing to participate, and it wouldn't be hard to divide them up so we could get a regular rotation going.

True, but you'd also have to have the host prepare topics of conversation, all the cast members will have to be up to speed on the subjects, someone will have to edit the podcast afterwards, and, most importantly of all, there has to be good chemistry between the cast. Too many podcasts feel flat because the team just doesn't synch correctly.

Besides the explanation of wanting to focus on local multiplayer I think this is the only reasonable explanation for not including online.

Have played 232 hours on Mario Kart (most of it online) I can very much see how the kind of problems seen in it's online could reek havoc on a 2D Mario game and before you say it I have decent internet with low ping. 

In Mario Kart I can't count the number of times that I have crossed the line in first place only to discover i've actually finished second or third.  I once spent an entire race against one other person comfortably holding off their challenge but wondering why they didn't use their red shells to then discover i was the one actually sitting in second place for the entire race.  Weapons, particularly shells, can be extremely unreliable online, I've had shells materialise under the wheels of my kart, karts appear in front of my eyes as if from no where but in the end Mario Kart still works because it still has one very basic principle to fall back on.  Weapons might play a role in the game but if latency causes issues with collision detection and precise positions of characters and items on the track the game can still rely on ye olde, who get's from point A to point B the fastest.

This simply wouldn't be good enough in a competitive or cooperative game of NSMBWii because it's not about who gets from point A to point B the fastest.  It's primarly about interaction with the other characters and items on screen in a very precise fashion.  What happens when your partner throws a koopa shell against a pipe which rebounds and kills you even though the koopa is still walking undisturbed on your screen?  What happens when the game goes to recalculate the precise positions of the four characters on the screen and discovers that the leading character and trailing character are actually four screens apart?

Now maybe someone who knows more about network latency and how Nintendo handles it's online can tell me that these problems could be overcome in NSMBWii but these are the problems that first occured to me when I thought about the possibility of online on in this game.