I find this whole line of thinking arrogant anyways. Uncle Bob pointed out that in the past they had a handful of gimmicky games that used accessories and those were mostly flops, Duck Hunt was like Wii Sports it came with the system but sold separately nobody would have bought it.
There is a difference between the "core" Nintendo gamer and the "core" gamer which many "Nintendo" fans fail to take into account. Some of us are not Nintendo fans were are video game fans, and unlike the "cheerleaders" who blindly praise any one company over the other, we try to just enjoy the good games and ignore the crap. Obviously everyone has a different opinion on tastes and what a "core" game is, but the fact is Nintendo chose a different path than their competitors.
Sales alone do not tell the entire picture we all agree on that, and honestly I don't give a **** about sales because I don't need others to like what I like to reaffirm anything, I bought a Sega CD and was perfectly happy with it, most other people think of it as a piece of ****, so what.
Nintendo did something bold last generation, they bet everything on Motion controls. The reason why so many gamers found this odd is because up until that point they had traditionally made hardware that was either on par with or superior to their competitors. With Wii you had a HUGE gap between the two and that was the deal breaker. It isn't that Nintendo abandoned anyone type of gamer they abandoned their own established track record. (keep in mind I am keeping consoles separate from hand held something the cheerleaders forget to do)
I have owned every single Nintendo console up to the Wii, I was generally pretty happy with each except the Wii. With N64 I felt you had to own two consoles to get the full experience so with Wii that was not something new, with Game Cube you should have been able to get the exact same games as the other two but didn't due to sales and maybe lack of online, in the beginning nobody made use of the DVD and near the end games still didn't fill them clear full so it is debatable if that had any impact or not, from a features set maybe for some, but the reason for the lack of games was Nintendo themselves. They only time they ever had good robust support was when they had no real competition and they were the only game in town.
I feel the industry abandoned Nintendo not that Nintendo abandoned their gamers. I do however think the side effect is most of us have moved on and grown tired. As to why we continue to discuss them, because we continue to HOPE things will get better and like what also gets forgotten too often they have a HAND HELD division that is not the same mess as their console division and that means, surprise surprise, many people do still buy their games just not their home consoles.