Well the problem with that is they waited so long a great number of people already paid scalper prices for the NES, maybe even some for snes pre-orders. It's a baffling decision. I've got to assume that switching a factory from making one product to another costs a decent amount of money.... so why not just keep making the nes classic instead of switching to the snes classic and then back again?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but they're not switching back and forth - they're going to produce both, and have at least verbally committed to keeping the runs going for a while.
Regardless of that, Nintendo are old school Japanese, and it's pretty clear that a lot of the decisions they make are not done like a modern company would. There's no rapid communication internally, and there's no questioning of the orders that come down from above. More than that, the company is ridiculously secretive, even keeping vital information from their own staff until the last minute.
What that means is that in 2017, they're struggling to apply old management and leadership models to new business. The Internet moves crazy fast, as does the hype it generates. When Nintendo say publicly "we were caught by surprise at the demand for the NES mini", that's an admission that they've never read a single post on any major gaming or social media post for at least 2 years, if not longer (suicide in the gaming industry). Hell, they've had their "emulation is the devil" posts up on their corporate website for a decade or more now, so someone somewhere had to know that there was demand for this. If that message didn't make it back up the chain to senior management, something is very wrong with their corporate culture.
Reading this -
https://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2017/09/nintendo-nes-mini-stock-returns/ - my bigger surprise is Nintendo acknowledging the eBay vultures at all. That says to me they at least see the missed profits their poor decisions led to.
With any luck, they've learned from this, and changed a few ways they do things internally. Maybe it'll bring Nintendo kicking and screaming into the 21st century finally. Either way, I'll be happy to see this eBay flipping nonsense done with.