Nintendo is a fool to not at least have made the XL take faceplates too. They do look neat. I think their decision to omit the reg 3ds is kind of smart. I don't honestly think it's as big a seller as we want to believe.
It's not, the numbers show this. The price points are close enough to where consumers see the two and think "Why would I buy the smaller one when it's not much more to get the larger one?"
I feel like a small subset of people take into consideration the small differences between the old 3DS and 3DS XL. The only real differences were the PPI of the screens, overall size and how comfortable they felt to different people. Other than that it was, big screens vs small screens.
I think Nintendo knows this and wanted to keep the regular N3DS price high, near the LL/XL price point. They tried to make the regular model more appealing hoping to maybe balance out the sales a bit more with the colored buttons and face plates. After seeing that people still were buying the N3DS XL more often in Japan they decided "Screw this, if people aren't going to buy it than we shouldn't spend all the extra cost in launching in the US with the N3DS since we also have to launch with face plates. They could have only launched with a few face plate designs.
If reports are true and the N3DS XL outsold the regular 2:1, maybe that is similar or less skewed in EU, but more heavily skewed in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if the XL to Reg ration in the US was 3:1 since the XL's release.