I have a source dating back from before Brawl came out that leaked me small tidbits like that.
A week before Brawl came out, we knew the entire roster and stage list, sans 1 stage. That 1 stage was a "Donkey Kong stage" and none of the leakers had unlocked it or known it or even played on it. Everyone on SWF back in the day speculated what this stage was, without knowing it.
Well, this source had a source in the gaming industry who worked on Brawl who knew: it was 75M. They told me, and they were right where no one else was right.
No one knew it outside of me, this person, anyone else this person informed, and this person's source. No, they didn't know until roughly 4 days after Brawl came out in Japan, lol.
It also helps with these leaks that they're a friend to me. Most people don't realize that about this person, lol.
So far the same person (or source) has had various people involved in development leak them the following things (this is the tl;dr version):
-Smash 4 has a HUGE advertising/promotional budget.
-Sakurai and co. likely began considerable planning for Smash 4 after Brawl came out.
-Planning for pre-production began at latest in 2010.
-Smash 4's pre-production team did a GODLIKE JOB and did better than anyone could have hoped.
-Smash 4's pre-prouduction began possibly in late 2010 but probably in 2011. That means development for Smash 4 has been about 3 1/2 years as of right now.
-Smash 4's pre-production was roughly a year, or 4 times as long as 64's, Melee's, and Brawl's pre-production (all those games had roughly 3 months of pre-production).
-Pre-production heavily involved all the directors not at Bamco as well as top Nintendo heads. This includes Sakurai and Miyamoto, and probably Iwata as well.
-Sakurai claims he wasn't fully working and programming the game until the end of pre-production in around January-March of 2012. However, he clearly was doing a lot of non-programming things during pre-production.
-Smash 4's roster was likely mostly finished early this year.
-Smash 3DS back earlier this year (2014) was said to be "going gold" sometime shortly after E3 this year.
-Smash 3DS can't be released after 2014 because the team "can't afford it."
-Until we're a bit under a month until Smash 3DS is supposed to come out, we won't know for sure about Smash 3DS, and until say October, we won't know for sure with Smash WiiU.
-Smash WiiU could very well be delayed into 2015 if the development team are going to do a lot of balancing and gameplay changes in response to fan reactions to the game and characters and how everything felt.
-The Bandai Namco staff working on Smash 4 is from all parts of Bamco.
-The Game Arts staff that worked on Brawl that Sakurai and co. liked basically all got hired to be a part of Sora.
-There is basically no part-time staff. The only part-time staff were head Nintendo honchos during pre-production, some staff that may be switching over to Tekken 7, and the staff dedicated to DLC.
-DLC, specifically DLC characters and patching, is definitely happening.
I assume 3DS version is playable at some corocoro thing?
