But even back then, Corrin was primarily male (something that wasn't rectified in Ultimate despite everyone else changing course), & it took the Smash Ballot for us to get Bayonetta. And even then, she remains the only female third-party character (besides Kazooie, but she's the secondary part of a duo). Do I expect Smash to get the percentage up to 30% in Ultimate's life-span, sadly no. But as I've said before, the least they can do is try to improve things at a reasonable pace. While Smash isn't a traditional fighting game, it's still leading the pack in sales. And by virtue, it should lead by example. Because of its success, I expect better from the series. And as you said, there are popular characters who happen to be women, & we aren't even getting them. And there's still the fact that we'll likely see a Fighters Pass that's 100% comprised of primarily guys, where the only female character is the secondary part of a duo. Even putting percentages aside, that looks bad. In Ultimate's base roster, we only have 4 new characters who are primarily female. But two of them are echoes (Dark Samus, who's debatable to begin with, & Daisy) & one is a semi-clone (Isabelle). To dismiss the situation out of hand is honestly disappointing. I understand your desire to be realistic, but we won't see them improve if we don't ask them to do better. Because right now, they aren't. And it's disappointing because Sakurai has expressed awareness of the problem in the past during the Wii U/3DS days.Smash isn't a traditional fighting game in the least bit, and as multiple people have pointed out before, Smash can't make more diverse fighters to satisfy any notions of diversity. I don't think we should treat it to the same standards since it largely operates completely independent fraom basically every other fighter in existence in regards to... pretty much everything? The 30% is just as arbitrary of a number that people will disagree upon as to if it's "good enough" given that it exists as an average across fighting games with wildly different circumstances to their characters, and most importantly, these titles have significantly fewer characters than Ultimate. It is far easier to get to a 30% ratio when you have a smaller number of fighters to begin with (and especially when those rosters are not primarily developed on the premise of including gaming and Nintendo All-Stars, many of which from eras when women and PoC were not given particularly strong representation). Titles like Street Fighter V (which has had four seasons of additonal DLC content) only have 46 to Smash's 82, and the game only launched with 16 characters. Mortal Kombat 11 only launched with a meager 25 characters this year for example. A game like Blazblue Cross Tag Battle only launched with 20 fighters and spent a year selling 20 as additional DLC and is only just starting to approach the 50s for total roster (and it can specifically rely more on IPs that develop female characters in meaningful ways like RWBY and it also has a smaller scope than Smash since it only focused on 4 series at launch).
For reference, to get to your 30% female fighting roster, the next 9 fighters all have to be unique female characters, as in there cannot be a single male or "other" fighter before we even get to 30% mark. Smash currently has more female fighters than Street Fighter V (13 currently with DLC), Mortal Kombat 11 (8 female fighters with DLC), Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator 2 (9 female fighters), Samurai Showdown 2019 (7 female fighters currently with DLC), Soulcalibur VI (10 currently with DLC), Tekken 7 (9 female fighters currently with DLC), Under Night-in-Birth (10 female fighters currently across multiple revisions of the same game, though I'm relying on Wiki information that I'm unsure of how complete it is, so that's worth keeping in mind). The only modern fighting title with more female playable characters is Blazblue Cross Tag Battle with an actually really damn impressive 30 (I think, again, the Under Night stuff I'm unfamiliar with, so I'm trying to make sure everything matches up). Part of that is that Blazblue Cross Tag Battle initially had a super specific set of four series it dove into, many of which were the rare ones to have quite a few popular female fighters (Especially RWBY, which more or less had to be all female until you got to like Qrow and Ren maybe). My point is that Smash is actually in line with the number of female fighters that appear in fighting games even if you don't count alts with female at all (11), and if you do, it's actually the second best game for female representation in number of female fighters at 15 playable characters with female options (not counting any partially female characters like Banjo & Kazooie and Ice Climbers mind you). And that's despite the inherent limitations the Smash format provides with the absolute largest scope in terms of guest characters, crossovers, and franchises; the focus on main characters; and a complete inability to make unique characters that can just inherently be more diverse.
I think focusing on 30% is part of the issue with your approach to incorporating more representation of women in Smash. 30% wildly means something different to each game given the size of its roster and Smash just has so many more variables regarding the characters in its roster. That's how it can have the second highest number of female characters in a modern fighting game, yet still have one of the lowest overall percentages of the roster. As I've said multiple times before, I'm all for including some more notable female fighters and diversifying the roster through those inclusions. What I'm not so keen on is your overall approach to the situation that seems more fixated on achieving a percentage than just supporting a nice selection of good female fighters that fit into Smash perfectly fine without changing much about the selection process. When those characters are exhausted, then we can start talking about how Sakurai picks characters more so than in the past, but that's still a fair amount off. I'm glad your promoting awareness of representation in Smash, but there's a lot more nuance to this overall situation with Smash that I just think needs to be acknowledged. Especially when the quality of representation also varies wildly from game to game (look at someone like Ivy in Soulcalibur, she adds to the female count, but my god is she hyper sexualized to the point of absurdity. That's something else to really keep in mind when comparing Smash to other titles).
As for the DLC, may I remind you that Smash for Wii U/3DS had 5 characters that were all male (I mean Mewtwo was clearly intended to be a male character and is always referred to as he, with his inspiration largely being taken from Pokemon: The First Movie) before Corrin came with female alts and Bayonetta ended the DLC season. An entire Fighter's Pass that has 4 males and one hybrid male/female combo isn't really all that bad in comparison and it shows us that sometimes these droughts in additional representation just happen. I think your notions of "doom and gloom" about the current trajectory of DLC are maybe coming in a little bit too soon.
As for your numbers, it's not just about the number of women, it's about the number relative to the size of the roster. It's why I structured the female fighters percentage thread the way that I did. To use ARMS for example, 6 women isn't that great on paper, but 6 out of 15 character is pretty damn good. Likewise, Street Fighter V has 13 ladies (currently) out of 38 characters overall, which is respectable. Roster sizes vary from game to game, so it's hard to just compare the number of women in each game, hence the use of percentages. This is where the problem lies for Smash. 15 ladies sounds good on paper, but 15 out of 81 isn't.