Gender locked race?

[Lauront]

And I have to disagree again. There are some things the playerbase cares about more than others. For an example of this, look to the BA feedback thread. Something that appeared minor to a lot of people got personally addressed by Yoshi and that was complaints about the additional story cutscenes of Eureka being locked behind BA. Yoshi even apologized for it in his post there and made a point to state he wouldn't to it again. Consider the fact that managed to get a response from Yoshi and consider how many more people are going to be upset by genderlocked viera.

How many people were invested enough in eureka's story to care about that cutscene? Enough to reach the dev leader apparently. Now imagine it over something even bigger than that, a brand new race. I don't know what else I can say to convince you this is a bigger deal than you think so you'll just have to wait and see.

There is a difference between things where they're fundamentally opposed to taking the game in a specific direction (e.g. BLU for the time being), and issues resulting from miscommunication (which Eureka falls under, mostly.) They won't necessarily treat all player demands on the same footing. They undid gender-locks in the past because they said they had underestimated how strongly desired the other gender option was for those races. However, if they're opposed out of reasons of principle (the gender/race combo does not fit their vision of the game), and consider that what they're instead proposing to do is add a male-only variant of another race as adequate to compensate for the lack of the opposite gender, you're dealing with a fundamentally different attitude.

At an extreme, unless this significantly hurt the game's profitability, I don't think they will back down, provided this is the underlying issue.