Takamaru and new characters

I know this is a bit old but I've been out of town for some time and I finally have the chance to talk about this. Anywho, it has been confirmed that Takamaru is an assist trophy in the newest Smash Brothers games. Was Takamaru a likely candidate for a new character. Somewhat, when you consider he's one of the best choices for a classic character. As Sakurai even mentioned in the Miiverse post, Takamaru was born the same year as Link, Pit and Samus. Not to mention his game has since been released in the US and Europe. But, yet, he is an assist trophy.  A classic Nintendo character who is also a samurai. Why not add him?

What I have considered for a while is that the game is pulling characters that are newer or who have at least been appearing in the newest games. To compare, let's look at the current line-up of new characters and compare them to Brawl's starting characters. Bold are characters after the inception of the newest Smash game. Note: for this comparison, I'm ignoring third party characters.

Brawl

• Meta-Knight: 1993
• Wario: 1992 (Wario Ware: 2002)
• Pit: 1987
• Zero Suit Samus: 2004
• Ike: 2005
• Pokemon Trainer: 1996
• Diddy Kong: 1994
• King Dedede: 1992
• Lucas: 2006
• Olimar: 2001

Smash Wii U

• Villager: 2001
• Wii Fit Trainer: 2007
• Rosalina and Luma: 2006
• Little Mac: 1984
• Greninja: 2013
• Palutena: 1987
• Mii Fighter: 2006
• Robin: 2013
• Lucina: 2013

In Brawl, 4 out of the 10 starting characters were new. In Smash 4, 6 of the 9 characters shown so far (sans the third party ones), are from a recent game. Also, it should be noted that Villager, Little Mac, and Palutena all have had a recent game (Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Punch Out!! [Wii] and Kid Icarus: Uprising).  With the exception of Pit, Brawl followed the same convention.  Wario was also based on Warioware, the newest games in the series.

Overall, it seems Smash 4 is focusing on the new rather than the old. The difference may be due to the fact that Brawl was trying to capture characters that weren't in Melee. Many of the characters who weren't new were also requested back when Melee was coming out. Now, with many of the characters added in Smash, adding the newest characters makes sense. Also, Amiibos may also play into this. With Nintendo promoting these toys, they would rather have characters people would be more familiar with rather than having forgotten characters.

Is there a chance we'll get a classic character. Perhaps. But Takamaru was the best show at getting one with his cameos and his history as a character.  We'll have to wait and see what happens. Based on this though, I would reason that the characters added this time would have appeared in recent games.