For instance, Masahiro Sakurai, from Smash Bros, initially explained how Rex, from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, was cut from the roster in Smash Bros Ultimate due to time constraints. At first, this was taken a bit… awkwardly, because later he added Byleth from Fire Emblem Three Houses, when that game was in development.
However, when Pyra and Mythra were added, also from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Sakurai explained how it wasn’t possible to have Rex playable with a swappable Blade, due to the Switch’s hardware limitations.
Here’s what I understood later on: if Sakurai stated that “Rex wasn’t added due to hardware limitations”, when Smash Bros Ultimate was released in late 2018, less than 2 years in the Switch’s lifespan, that… wouldn’t have been good publicity ^^;
So yeah, was there a developer’s excuse/justification that you only understood later?
One that I continuously understand is developers not optimizing games properly.
From optimizing for consoles which is significantly underpowered compared to the PCs devs use, to optimizing for every PC GPU and CPU.
Recent example is Larian saying they couldn’t launch Baldur’s Gate 3 on Xbox day one because of the Series S.