Honestly, if I hadn't been able to play roms in college 8 years after I had packed my 8bit Nintendo away I would not have purchased anything on virtual console for the Wii.
Abandonware has ceased to exist in the console world. Especially for Nintendo.
As I said, it is just a conspiracy theory, but leaving the power port to transfer data as well as power in the SNES classic after the same design allowed massive hacking of the NES classic does give a slight nod towards the theory.
I have felt that the virtual console prices are way to high for what they are. But stuff it in $10 worth of largely OSS and off the shelf hardware with a pretty case and sell it for $60 and I'm all in.
I think given that emulation is a pretty well known thing within the target audience for the classic systems, protecting against it is a lost cause. The market for the classics are nostalgia driven game folks which is different from the switch, which is broader. They have to convince Mum and Dad of
Shelly the 12yo that there is something there. Of course if Mum and Dad happen to see a game from their childhood that they've forgotten about on the Eshop, so much the better. Plus that entire teenage market isn't as susceptible to nostalgia purchases as the 30-40 market is right now. We'll see another wave of those kinds of devices in 20 years :D.
Given the low numbers of the classic systems available, it just had all the ear markings of a small group's side project that may or may not have worked, rather than a complete exec buy in to be the "next-big-thing".