I think Yu Suzuki speaks, or atleast understands English pretty well. I've seen a video where he spoke a few sentences of English and even his pronunciation was ok.
Here.
in fairness he probably knows enough to get the general idea when talking simply about wanting shenmue 3 for instance, but there's a reason why he has a translator
and to be honest he's probably better at english than peter molyneux, who seemed to be stumbling through the introduction in that gdc 2000 video you linked like he'd had a few bottles of wine beforehand. "shinmoo" by "yu simisuki" indeed.
completely agree about shenmue's unpopularity being overstated though. if anything it could do quite well considering how geared the market is towards narrative driven games now, especially considering shenmue always had a wealth of gameplay variety and far reaching depth and breadth when it came to world building. nobody is expecting huge numbers though, and shenmue 3 as it was originally envisioned with a few extra bells and whistles on would not cost the world to develop.
it's not like the shenmue fanbase has shrunk all that much either, it's achieved cult status quite some time ago and there are still people (some of which i think are in this thread) who didn't play shenmue on release and still very much enjoyed it despite hopping onto the boat several years later.
as for why people tell us to let it go? i dunno. it doesn't concern them, they're no more mature or significantly more of a realist than any one of us. they're the fun police, or rather the optimism police. it's very petty really, and i wish they'd fuck off.