I know you're joking, but I've seriously never gotten this train of thought. Wouldn't it be more easy to assume we would have gotten nothing instead?
I mean, we don't know exactly when the Echo Fighters were planned out during development (it's safe to assume that Richter and Ken probably happened earlier on, due to third-party negotiations being required) or if all of them were even part of the original project plan.
I feel like the current selection we have now would've been narrowed down from a larger group of characters, chosen for a variety of reasons (popularity, adapatability over their base character, Sakurai bias [in the case of Ken], etc). In a way, I guess it could be valid to assume a different character could have replaced one of the final echoes if they had a particular amount of them planned, but in the (more likely) scenario of the echoes being added if timed allowed it, then Chrom in particular was likely seen as a simple inclusion (in comparison to other potential echo fighters) that they could feasibly squeeze into the game.
This is all, of course, just speculation with not much to go on.
