I am a little behind on my responses, been busy at work.
Nickmitch, sorry if I offended you or misrepresented what you were saying, somehow I misread your post.
Personally I think there is literally nothing Nintendo can ever do to get back to the SNES days of control, third party support, and originality. The SNES was probably the last time Nintendo launched as many franchises that have stuck around since the NES.
Launching new franchises means squat when all they do is cater to the same crowd though. As much fun as Spaltoon is, it is probably the most Nintendo like game to come along. On the NES and SNES they were not just known for one type of game like they are now, they had a very broad range.
They occasionally branch out using partners but the reality is they rarely take the chances like they once did. This is the problem they have gotten themselves into. The real issue is they didn't know the NES was going to take off so they did everything they could to make sure it had every type of game that was required to sell the system. When the market accepted them then their partners flocked to release games on the system to cash in.
Nintendo needs to accept they do not NEED third parties, they need games. They need variety and they desperately need more than just a token effort in each franchise. They need to get a proper fighting game franchise on their system that satisfies the fighting game fans that attracts other fighting games to market to to compete. They need a new Killer Instinct to compete with the MK, SF, Tekken, Soul Calibur, etc, games of the world. They have Smash Bros, great I love it, we all do who doesn't? But that is not enough. They can't loan out Link to a 3rd party, stick him in a game that the other guys also have and call it a day, they need their own Eternal Champions, they need their own Virtua Fighter, they need a flagship 1 on 1 marshal arts game that has all the token gameplay and features that fighting game fans expect, set in a very not-Nintendo world that you could pick up and play and not know it wasn't a Playstation game.
Up until GameCube Nintendo also released their own line of sports games, where are those? They don't have 2K or EA so they should step things up and buy a smaller studio that does sports and re-launch some forgotten franchises or start up some new ones. Hell they missed out on this with Wii and Wii Sports was what sold the damn thing. If they had continued to focus on that maybe other companies would have followed suit.
There are just too many to name, Nintendo, when they are at their peak and all their core franchises are getting their fair shake, can carry any console on their own, they have done it before. What they need is to step away from Mario and Zelda and really ramp up 1, all their forgotten franchises, and 2, starting up brand new ones in genres they are lacking. They need their own Castlevania type game, not a clone but some sort of Golden Axe or something like Sega used to do, find a game that was not on their system and make their own.
But they desperately need to expand while they are at it. Merging the two machines into a single platform, however they manage to do that, is a start but still not enough. They don't need to stop making the quirky, fun, exotic stuff that makes them who they are, but they really need to focus on getting some games that their console is missing, and Bayonetta was not the right call that was at best a start but they should have had their own team making their own big scale God of War, Assassin's Creed, Prince of Persia clone. Why is Microsoft so successful because they see what games the market is pining for and if they can't get a 3rd party game in a genre they just make one, where would they be without Halo. Sure Metroid Prime is a MUST, but they also need a real gritty, violent, and epic space shooter FPS that can cater to that crowd.
And as lame as it sounds they need the fan service people keep begging for, Mario Paintball, some sort of World of Nintendo rpg dungeon crawler that makes use of Amiibo, a new F-Zero game, a proper Pokemon console RPG, a Kirby game that plays like Kirby, and the list goes on.
I guess bottom line is there is nothing they can do but what they already do and they know it. They need to expand or get help.