I love speculations, it's fun, but I don't think any content mentioning Call Of Duty on Nintendo console while the Activision takeover is not official yet is even worth discussing.
There has to be that one game that will be heavily promoted at E3 and will release in Holidays. If it's not revealed here, it will be revealed at E3 itself. TotK will be out by then. Something that was Odyssey to E3 2017, or Smash at E3 2018 and so on. It definitely won't be Pikmin sadly. But it will be something else, and that something will be bigger than a lot people think.
I'm glad E3 is back. Last year we had a partner showcase in June, no announcements from Nintendo. As eager as I am for new information, I think that if they have things to announce about Metroid and Mario, there's no better time to do it than during E3. And if they don't launch new hardware in 2023, I'm betting like a lot of people on 2D Mario by the end of the year, because, indeed, you can't call it a "small" release.
The "another damn Donkey Kong" sentiment never made any sense to me because it was Retro's second Donkey Kong game after their first one sold millions of units. Why was anyone surprised they were going to make a sequel?
I'm an absolute Metroid fan, but objectively I think a lot of people unfortunately have no idea how important DK is.
Damn, Mario is actually a Donkey Kong spin off! I loved Rare's games, liked Retro's a lot, and didn't particularly enjoy Jungle Beat, but I find it perfectly logical and pretty cool that Nintendo cares about DK again because it's just gigantic unused potential.
If EPD Tokyo is really working on this, I trust Koizumi to steer their teams towards something exciting and ambitious. I mean, more ambitious than "let's prove ourselves as a new in-house studio with a limited budget and bullshit kongas".