Quite a good breakdown by Laura Kate Dale of Nintendo's handling of recent games featuring playable women characters from franchises usually headed up by men i.e. recent Peach game and upcoming Legend of Zelda game featuring the titular Zelda.
Featuring such Aonuma bangers as:
If we have Princess Zelda as the main character who fights, then what is Link going to do?
The triforce is made up of Princess Zelda, Ganon and Link. Princess Zelda is obviously female; if we made Link a female, we thought that would mess with the balance of the triforce - that's why we decided not to do it.
We feel like what takes priority is this idea of gameplay. If it turns out that particular gameplay we're trying to bring to fruition would be best served by having Zelda take that role, then it's possible that that could be a direction we could take.
i.e. Zelda has featured exclusively MANLY gameplay up to this point btw
There are lots of people young enough to have never seen a new F-Zero game be put out on a console they have access to, so imo that's all they'd have to do to make big bucks, even if it's just pretty much the same game with shinier graphics