My sense/feeling on the sponsorship with Nintendo is this: the only way they can contribute pot bonuses to tournaments is by talking to NoJ/NCL and it would be a very difficult endeavor to convince them it's worth spending whatever amount of money (adding to the pot) on a tournament that is comparatively niche to the general Nintendo audience. It's also highly unlikely they would use any of their own money that NoA has (their marketing money and the like) on throwing some money into the pot at tournaments like EVO. Especially when, again, they may not want to commit financially to the competitive community yet when its future is uncertain.
It's uncertain in the sense that it's hard to say whether the year-over-year growth will continue or if it'll reach a peak and stagnate kinda like Brawl eventually did in 2010 (it peaked in 2010 and then ever since then could only ever manage to get 300+ entrants at majors/nationals from that point forward). Things are looking good right now, for sure, with Melee nearly doubling its entrants count from last year at EVO but who knows if the momentum can keep going into next year.
I'm appreciative of the idea to tweet about the tournaments they're sponsoring to give the community visibility and attract potential new players to the community. However, a pot bonus would also be a good additional thing to do down the road when Nintendo feels comfortable.
What would be even better, if they are so unwilling to contribute actual money to the pot... and want to keep Melee specifically alive, would be to do a Melee HD release (using the PAL version as the base to unite the community on one version, by the way!) It would also help those new players they're attracting to the community get into Melee as well as Smash 4 if they wanted. But... that's super unlikely now given the current situation with the Wii U and NX (they're clearly shifting teams to the NX).
Maybe Nintendo will surprise us in a year. I certainly hope so. But at least their support isn't completely worthless given they're helping reaching people the tournament scene otherwise can't. Even if I'm disappointed at their support so far, I can at least appreciate Bill has a good grasp on the community and seems to want to let the community do things on their own (but again financial support would further help to foster and keep the community alive...) running tournaments and making trips to them (as players) is not cheap and isn't very sustainable in the long-term without some major financial backing for events (aka sponsors)