Yes, Plant is in fact a character with a very unique moveset and a really well known enemy across a very popular series.

However, I meant it was a dumb decision regarding development time.

You may say "but it's easy to animate" and i agree, having the character have no facial expressions (it still moves the mouth and grins and much more but you get what i say), unlike other characters.

However, the dev team still has to model the different transformations the plant uses in different attacks, they gotta make the hitboxes match, they have to get people to voice the character, they have to get new lines for the voice actors (Guidances, narrators across different languages, etc).

Basically, a lot of work towards a joke character in a franchise with a lot of characters already (and just to note, i agree Mario should be the franchise with the most characters in the roster, given it's been a super influential franchise and it's earned its spot and stuff).

What I'm saying, all of this effort could have been spent in a character from another franchise that could use the spot (Spring Man, a Zelda newcomer, more echo fighters, etc).

We still got a really unique fighter i'm definitely gonna main, but i still stand it was a dumb decision for the dev team.

Also Note: was developed in a mere 2 weeks, so in the case Piranha Plant had a similar development time to an echo or effortless joke chars, i'll eat my own words and shut my mouth with a zipper.

eww gross no

bethesda do not get anyone in anything until they can stop making fallout 76 even worse

Your fundamental flaw is calling Plant a "joke" character. There is literally nothing implying this character should be taken as seriously as Sandbag or Crusade's Weegee. It's a full fledged character, and for the reasons we agreed on above, it's a good choice for one. Unconventional != "joke"

I mean cool, my point still stands that the character's resources could have gone to someone else

It's a pretty meaningless point because you can apply it to literally anyone and anything you don't like in the game

I can say dumb s*** like "the only reason Waluigi isn't playable is because they wasted their time and money making an adventure mode that's literally 24 hours long" and nobody can really dispute it because they don't know how the development process went

The devs make what they want to make, your favourite character wasn't dropped just because they wanted to put Piranha Plant in