They paid attention to what the market was looking for. Just not the original market. It went towards little kids. And it worked anyway.
Yeah, but little kids never played Spore -_-
The original plan for Hero was actually a port of Space Stage over to Wii, actually. I wish they had done that instead, frankly.
And why did they shirk the online capability? I think so very often in most Wii games, "They could have made this online, it would have been better." An online Sporepedia (which, for the record, was going to be implemented into the Space Stage Spore Hero original concept) would have been fantastic. They were very stingy with the number of creatures you could create in Hero too.