Nintendo being Nintendo has served them well for decades. It's not reasonable to expect them to throw their entire corporate identity out just because they have a huge Wii-shaped bump in their stock chart.
What makes Nintendo unique among console makers--and what carries them through each generation--is focusing on making fun games, not abiding the latest trends. Nintendo does roughly what Apple does: let the competitors make all the big mistakes and take the PR hits, then come behind and release something that gets it right on the first try.
There's a difference between chasing trends and actually doing research into a problem-area before releasing your service.
And the bit where you claim they release something that gets it right on the first try? That's the exact opposite of Nintendo history. Friend codes, the Wii shop, the Netflix-app-disc situation -- these were not examples of Nintendo "getting it right". These are counter-examples.
That said, I wasn't speaking to whether Nintendo-being-Nintendo was good or bad for them. I was just pointing out that the Wii U's situation isn't particularly surprising.
I would completely disagree about friend codes--Nintendo fundamentally makes consoles and portables, and games for same, that it's "safe" to hand over to your five-year-old without all that much supervision. Friend codes add network connectivity to that mixture without sacrificing five-year-old safety. Any sort of a "lobby" system, on the other hand--especially one that allows chat--instantly sacrifices five-year-old safety (and will teach your kids several new words!)
I should have been more clear: per-game friend codes were the most egregious problem. Per-account friend codes are a reasonable-enough precaution, given their target market.
Even still: allowing some mute matchmaking and play, with friend codes required for anything involving trades or chat, is a superior solution to the same problem that was already available in the market to be co-opted [1], if only Nintendo ever considered what others had done and learned.
[1] basically what ToonTown Online was doing in the same space, for the same reasons, since 2003.
Really, I think this is a difference in outlook between the American and Japanese markets. Look at Pokemon, for example: in western markets, it was seen as a "you mean I have to buy two versions to 100% the game!?" cash-grab; in Japan--which is much denser, geographically--you were actually reasonably likely to have multiple people to trade with for any game with such features.
To put it another way: Nintendo basically expects people to want to play with their "real friends" over the net--as an extension of their older "sit around a console in the living room together" dynamic--and sees no benefit in letting people play with/against strangers. They assume that if a kid wants badly to find someone to play a game with, they'll go and find someone in the real world, convince them [to convince their parents] to buy the game, and play it with them. This also, as a side-benefit (from Nintendo's perspective), shunts the work of "moderation" in these games to the parents: deciding whether to let your child hang around with some other child is already a well-established thing that parents do, and making it a prerequisite to establishing a game-play link means that parents can't complain to Nintendo for exposing their children to "the wrong sorts"--the responsibility was effectively passed back to them.
What makes Nintendo unique among console makers--and what carries them through each generation--is focusing on making fun games, not abiding the latest trends. Nintendo does roughly what Apple does: let the competitors make all the big mistakes and take the PR hits, then come behind and release something that gets it right on the first try.