I agree, Mother 3 is great, and a wonderful change of pace in today's world of RPGs. Plus it's just a great game in its own right, with a lot of the same charms as EB. One of Nintendo's best projects ever, and still probably Brownie Brown's crowning achievement.
I'm all for more people playing great games. Lots of quality titles don't see western release though, so maybe I'm selfish by thinking that the Mother series deserves special consideration.
Well isn't it all the stuff to do with unlicensed samples in the music, etc? If it were an easy (cheap) thing to do, I assume they would have done it back on the Wii VC.
It's apparently way less than people originally thought. It's not like a giant chunk of the game's soundtrack suffers from copyright infringement. It's just two songs that can basically be replaced by other songs in the game, plus the name "Dali's Clock" that can easily be changed. Over the years people in the fan community have been using PK Hack to make all sorts of interesting changes to EB. If a hacker can easily go in at this point and change the [possibly] infringing themes, then Nintendo can.
I'd be surprised if it's somehow way more complicated than that. I just think that Nintendo didn't give a shit and didn't want to waste more resources on a failed franchise.