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
I really don't know how you'd come to that conclusion if you took into account the trajectory of what Nintendo has done with Zelda recently. The sort of systems-driven and open-ended gameplay of Echoes seems to be much more of a continuation of what they already started with BOTW (especially the 2d prototype they created for that game) and continued exploring with TOTK than something they would have come up with if they started out from the idea of having Zelda as the protagonist and designed the game downwards from there. This is obviously not how Nintendo always operates, and I'd bet money that the Princess Peach game that came out this year actually was the result of some market research telling them they'd need a game to market to girls specifically and that was then designed from that idea downwards, but I really don't think that is how they're conceptualizing Zelda games right now, where the team and their games seems to have been successful enough to be free from such concerns.
Fair enough regarding the progression of the game design across the series. Nintendo games do be pricey, so I didn't take it into account because I haven't played most of them. But that actually makes even more sense regarding why they feel comfortable bringing in zelda as mc for the first time now.
i.e. they would only cast zelda for the mc role if she was more suited to the gameplay than link. Read: Link has been more suited to be the protagonist of each mainline game up to this point. So now that they're cooking with a different gameplay formula (not a bad thing on its own) they feel like zelda can take centre stage (also not a bad thing on its own).