How likely is it that Sword and Shield started off as 3DS titles and were then ported to the Switch sometime during development? With what we know about how Ishihara and possibly Masuda felt about the Switch, it feels like it could be a possibility, although a low one.
Honestly if these games didn't go through some sort of development catastrophe I'd be fucking astonished, there's almost zero chance something didn't go horribly wrong or was vetoed by higher ups at some point. If they really started with a clean slate on the Switch and all of the decisons they made for these games were 100% made by the dev team there's no hope for this franchise.