I doubt Naughty Dog would be the one to make it, but the examples you gave aren't really fair in terms of showing that there is no audience for platformers on consoles.
Tearaway - Released on a dead system.
Puppeteer - Classic Sony sent to die marketing. It's also not really very good as far as platforming game mechanics go.
Rayman - Would have sold much better if they released the Wii U version in February when it had a good amount of hype for it instead of delaying it to compete with all the fall games.
The Lego games all sell pretty well, we've had five Ratchet games this gen despite their supposed bomba status, DKCR sold very well, the Mario games, IMO there is still a market for a platformer with a decent marketing push released during the holidays on a system that people actually give a shit about. I don't expect it to have asscreed level production values with 600+ people working on the game, but I don't think platforming fans want that anyway.
Edit: Actually we've had six ratchet games, fair enough that only 4 of them were platformers.
I'm not saying there's no market. Just not at the high end, flagship game, system seller end of it ... at least not unless you are Nintendo.
The Vita is struggling true, but why hasn't Tearaway been able to match the early sales of Soul Sacrifice, Killzone Mercenary and a bunch of other games on a platform that should actually be more friendly to platformers?
Do you really think Puppeteer (one of my Favorite games of 2013) would have sold even 1m copies with "marketing"?
Do you think Rayman would have done better on one system with a 4m unit install base vs a >160m install base that it finally released on. If the platformer market is as healthy on consoles as you think surely it would sell even against the "big" games because it would have appeal to its target market.
Mario is Mario and it will always have a market on consoles irrespective of platformers in general. On the other hand if you're expecting any non Mario platformer to sell as much as any Uncharted/Assassins Creed type game on a home console I have some property on Pluto to sell you. You're absolutely right that Sony could get one of their smaller studios (Sanzaru/Bend for example) to push out a downloadable title. My point is that it makes no financial sense for them to have their top tier studios working on platformers when there's clearly more money elsewhere.
