While I agree with your point, and no one is disputing that Nintendo owns all rights to Mario and they may not need more visitors, goodwill is a difficult thing

While I agree with your point, and no one is disputing that Nintendo owns all rights to Mario and they may not need more visitors, goodwill is a difficult thing to earn. It's even easier to lose. Time will tell, but hopefully they will either take this or have their own dev team release something. That fact is that this project is now public domain, it's right there on Github and any of us can take the source code and build it. Of course it's illegal to host it, but that doesn't mean that those more techincally inclined couldn't run the game locally.