Some of this stuff isn't even true (sales-wise) or even relevant to the expanded audience.
Quality is not relevant to the expanded audience? I should very much like to meet the people who thought that motion controls were essential to NSMB Wii (so essential that it was not classic controller compatible) and not a detractor from the game's quality. I should also like to meet the people who are still excited to see the same world themes we've seen in the past four NSMB games, and would not rather see Nintendo do something more interesting. And I would definitely like to meet the people who think that the approach of "we will make it easy to get to the end of the game, but challenge experienced players to find all the Star Coins" has resulted in a game experience that is as timelessly enjoyable as those of SMB1, SMB3, and/or SMW.
The "expanded audience" is not just
new players. It is also
lapsed players such as those who were fans of the NES and SNES Mario games but not the 3D ones.
Your apparent hatred for Aonuma Zelda doesn't even factor in the fact that the series generally did well on the Wii (especially TP).
TP was perceived as correcting some of the things people didn't like about the previous Aonuma-directed Zelda games:
- Art style was realigned with popular medieval fantasy
- Weird game structure ideas like a revolving three-day time limit (MM) and segmented island-based game world (TWW) were abandoned in favor of a more OoT-like game structure
- Exploration and combat were believed to have taken more precedence (as opposed to NPC interactions which rose to importance in MM and TWW)
Those are the big three things that really resonated with people, I'd say. Even outside of gaming forum circles, these three moves made TP more appealing as a fantasy action/RPG/adventure type game. It looked (at least) more like OoT, and I don't think we need to dispute OoT's popularity at the time.
Skyward Sword was seen as moving away from all three of these things. It moved back in the direction of the Wind Waker art style (when did the market indicate that it wanted that?), the way the sky was executed resulted in an even more segmented game world, and while combat and action were indeed emphasized with MotionPlus, the hand-holding dramatically crushed much of the sense of exploration within the game world segments.
This may be anecdotal, but many of the lapsed Zelda players I know who were attracted to Twilight Princess (because it looked like something they could recognize as a modern version of Zelda) were pretty indifferent toward Skyward Sword. I suspect this is because Skyward Sword has too much bloat (which is not "too much stuff" but "too much stuff that gets in the way of what the player really wants to do"). This was a "bad habit" that it carried over from Twilight Princess, but to a much more ridiculous extent with Eiji Aonuma even later admitting that he was wrong about players needing to be guided through the game instead of finding things on their own. Meanwhile, a certain other medieval fantasy franchise which was outsold by Twilight Princess sold circles around Skyward Sword. I do not believe this is a coincidence.
And the complaints about difficulty or whatever are so internet nitpicky it doesn't even represent the family that purchased NSMBU for their 7 year-old, who is sufficiently challenged by his first Mario.
The audience of Super Mario Bros. is not just children, you know. If putting out a Mario game on a Nintendo console was enough to get families to buy them for their children without basing those purchases preconceived notions of what these games are or should be like, why did New Super Mario Bros. resonate so much better with the "families buying games for children" audience than the Mario games on Nintendo 64 or GameCube? The audience who bought NSMB Wii is apparently a discerning enough audience to care about the difference between side-scrolling and 3D Mario. This tells you that they are not uninformed.
Nintendo did plenty to try and win back the Wii crowd. Hell, they front-loaded the first year with as many Wii reprises (Wii Sports+, WiiPlay U, WiiFit U, NSMBU, DKC:TF, Game and Wario, arguably Nintendoland) as they could get away with. The games themselves may have been half-assed or unappealing, but that's because there's no where else to go with that crowd or no new way to spin it.
Why not? They certainly weren't half-assing the original Super Mario Bros. or Donkey Kong Country sequels, and when they gave them due priority and were pushing them as innovative and exciting titles (see: with new and appealing content) they certainly did a good job keeping up their sales, even across generations.
(DK64 even managed to avoid the sharp franchise sales decline suffered by Mario's leap to 3D, probably because Rare was able to position it well among 3D platformers at the time... similar to the original DKC's role on SNES to help Nintendo ward off Sonic.)