Spiegel said:The same rumor says that the initial expectations from Capcom for the first shipment were 700k. As jcm says some kind of problem with the cartridge manufacturing capability seems more likely than 'Oh, surely Capcom wants to troll Nintendo'.
Questioning Capcom's 3DS decisions after them announcing or releasing Monster Hunter, Resident Evil and Street Fighter games not even a year after the console is in the market is pretty ridiculous.
Another possible reason could be that the release candidate failed and they still need to fix some last minute bugs, delaying the manufacturing for a few weeks and thus not being able to produce enough for the launch