Compare Xenoblade to the mother series, it only had 1 game while Mother had 3 games and they were all successful, i think the fan base of mother series is bigger than Xenoblade and nintendo is losing money for it.
Saying "It has a bigger fanbase than Xenoblade" isn't much of an accomplishment.
Even then, when was the last time a Mother game hit US shores? It has no new brand recognition. Yeah, Nintendo has brought brands with little recognition back (Kid Icarus) but not a RPG. Kid Icarus received a good and popular revival because A) it's an action game (which are popular in EU/US), B) Kid Icarus already had some brand recognition (his two games were released in the US/EU and Brawl helped a lot), and C) it's not a RPG. If you expect a RPG with little brand recognition to new audiences, let alone a Japanese turn-based RPG, then you might as well throw that money into a fireplace since you'll at least get some warmth from it.
There's a really bad case of tunnel vision that comes with GBAtemp-like communities. Yeah, most of us know what Mother is and are able to play them all in English, but for everyone else, who isn't on a community based around flashcards, homebrew, and hacks, it's completely foreign.