You're right Animal Crossing Bells that there was a lot of hatred and disrespect towards Sakurai, but Smash Kingdom was in great fun and generally featured a lot of dark humor.

If anything, it could be claimed that the incidence of unarmed fighters are best balanced out by the inclusion of more weapon-users, swords or otherwise (that is not an argument I would make myself, but it might be produced with much more merit than the debate that there are too many swords-users). Anyway, the simple truth is that swords would be the most frequent weapon given to video game heroes, because they're the archetypical heroic weapon --'ve been since the Samurai of Japan along with the myths of the knights of Europe. There's not any fantastic reason to penalize characters for that. The character's weapon or fighting style of choice is not a good reason to limit them out of SSB; its nothing but pure private prejudice.

You know, I get that nowadays most of us understand Ike and Marth as using entirely different playstyles, but as a participant who started out sometimes playing Brawl at my buddy's home, I had a whole lot of trouble telling apart Marth from Ike. With Byleth, even casuals could tell them apart as a result of their strong bow, lance, Warlock Punch-like down particular, and alts, but as a total casual, the only thing I remembered about Ike and Marth from using them in Subspace was that one of them felt stronger and a bit more fun.

Even though Ike isn't a Marth clone, I believe that it can be trying for total casuals who have only played them to pronounce what makes them distinct. I think Sakurai realized that, which explains why he chose to proceed with Robin since the brand new FE rep for Smash 4 rather than Chrom and none of the non-echo FE personalities cheap Animal Crossing New Horizons Bells have depended entirely on sword moves since then.