Atrosanity, we usually don't learn about considered characters until a while after the games are released. Even then we only know what was planned for Brawl through hacking. Sakurai stopped letting us know who he considered back in the Melee days. With Brawl and probably even now, he'd rather not reveal such info just in case he finds a way to include those characters in a future title.
Well yeah, but a leaker isn't necessarily going to care about that, are they?
They're probably just padding out their lists with those sort of comments to make their 'leaks' stand out more, but if the game does indeed come out in spring it's not too weird they'd have also found out about characters who were pitched or planned but got the cutting block. Why they'd bother saying as much when there's a very small chance anybody would ever know one way or the other and be able to verify it (unless character data like in Brawl is left behind on the disc/game cartridge) is beyond me though.
Stuff like that is just laughable.
I'm not really arguing the legitimacy of the leak (already said I think it's fake, as much as I'd love Ridley/4 DK characters), I just don't really get how it'd be impossible if the game really does come out this spring for most of the staff (or at least modelers/riggers/programmers) to be aware of a couple characters who were planned and got to varying stages of completion before getting the axe. Like, I'm assuming some amount of Melee's dev team had to be aware that there was a finished Ganondorf model with a sword and standing stance finished before it got cut and then at some point got promptly resurrected as a falcon clone, and not just Sakurai and a select couple people, but I'm admittedly making assumptions about how games' developments both in the early 2000's and now are managed.