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@Robot99 Let me go over why Wave 1 is structured as it is, to the best of my knowledge.

First off, there are certain overall considerations when it comes to the BCP. Wave 1 was extremely rushed, from which we can conclude a couple of things. They couldn't pick any courses that weren't already created for Tour by the later months of 2021, and they intentionally avoided courses with underwater sections and half-pipes so the team (which appears to have mostly been people who did not work on the original MK8) would have more time to get to grips with implementing those mechanics.

There are also two notable aspects regarding how the overall BCP is structured. First, every cup starts with a Tour city. The Tour cities act as the "nitro" courses for the BCP despite not being new in actuality, so this helps give them emphasis. Additional Tour courses and/or courses that would be marketed as new are likewise generally at the end of their given cup or the semifinal for a cup in the final wave of either row. The BCP also attempts to mimic the general structure of Mario Kart 7 and 8, with a basic circuit at the start, a Mario Circuit in each row and the final cup of each row ending with a Rainbow Road. The progression from wave to wave also tries to account for how Wave 3 is both the end of its row and a Special/Lightning Cup parallel while also needing to naturally lead into Wave 4 as a kind of semi-reset.

Wave 1 is of course a sort of Mushroom/Shell Cup parallel (hence the Golden Dash Cup being literally another Mushroom Cup and having Toad Circuit as the first course following the mandatory Tour city). I'm going to gloss over the exact methodology towards estimating when Tour courses were complete (it has to do with both course ID stuff which you may have heard about, alongside metadata for images on Nintendo's servers which is also a whole thing) but I can very personally attest to it being well-sourced.

Paris Promenade and Tokyo Blur are easy, they're by far the simplest Tour city courses and the simplest implementations of the route change mechanic. As for why they did Paris first, I do suspect that as you said it's simply due to it being a good introduction to the mechanic. It's possible that they did consider the relationship between Tokyo Blur and Ninja Hideaway as you suspect but it's important to note that the cup themes were chosen due to the courses, not the opposite (and imo they made a pretty big mistake announcing them before the course lineup was finalized).

Ninja Hideaway is also easy. They made a point of including at least one Tour/new non-city course as the kind of big new course of each wave. Of course Ninja Hideaway had already debuted in Tour so they couldn't actually call it "new" in marketing materials (though they did include a "Tour" prefix in marketing for a time, and never stopped doing so in Japan specifically due to Tour probably being more popular and known-about over there) but they did at least leave it prefix-less in-game to achieve the same effect with those who are generally not aware of Tour's content. The reason to include it specifically in Wave 1 despite its difficulty is seasonal relevance. Ninja Hideaway is for all intents and purposes a springtime course with its cherry blossoms, and debuted in Tour in Spring 2021 for that same reason. This is the same reasoning for every non-city aside from Piranha Plant Cove (though it has its own reasons for being in Wave 6 anyhow). Also, Yoshi's Island was far from completion at the time.

Toad Circuit was of course their pick for the starter circuit. Why that one? Well the only starter circuits complete for Tour at the time were it and N64 Luigi Raceway, so it must have been a rather easy choice (what with Choco Mountain in the same cup and base 8 Deluxe already having a Raceway from Mario Kart 64).

This is probably pretty obvious, but Coconut Mall is the big marketing course for the wave. I get disagreements about this a lot, but I am 100% certain that the #1 priority for the Booster Course Pass was to market the NSO Expansion Pack (hence it being rushed to release before the end of the fiscal year in which the Expansion Pack released). As such, it's kind of entirely built around marketing (hence their motivation to, say, pass certain courses as being made for 8 Deluxe). And you can tell they really pushed to get Coconut Mall in there because it's especially rushed, with its bizzare visual appearance in the reveal trailer and original marketing screenshot, and their inability to make the moving cars function in time. As you may be able to guess from that, Coconut Mall was the final Wave 1 course to be completed for Tour by far, with it estimated to have been completed for Tour around October 2021, which likely gave them less time to port it over. Its marketable status is also naturally why it ends off the Golden Dash Cup.

Sky Garden was the only GBA course in the BCP, aside from Sunset Wilds, which would've been feasible to include in Wave 1, so that's rather simple too.

Choco Mountain and Shroom Ridge I think were just kind of what they felt worked best then. Shroom Ridge specifically was likely being distanced from both Berlin Byways in Wave 3 and Mushroom City in Wave 6.

And I feel like that's probably enough to get the gist. Hopefully me writing so much despite trying to keep things brief helps explain my position that the BCP is ultimately very well/thoughtfully designed despite the circumstances under which it was made lol.

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Can't really agree with any of this lol. Sky-High Sundae was completed for Tour like a month before Coconut Mall was, as far as we can tell. The reason to wait until Wave 2 with it is again seasonal, the course very naturally fits Summer. They were also pushing the phrasing that that these are "remastered" courses during Wave 1, likely to downplay the graphical differences to that of the base 8 Deluxe, which wouldn't have played well with introducing a new course right from the start (not to mention that they would then have two consecutive waves with no brand new courses in them). All in all it really wouldn't have made sense to do that.

Also, Sky-High Sundae having been initially developed as a World course doesn't really make sense to me. Nobody's ever particularly tried to explain why they'd even choose to make it debut in Tour (note that Sky-High Sundae being a course in Tour is basically guaranteed to have not been influenced by the BCP, unlike most of the 2023 courses), and I don't particularly buy the idea that the layout couldn't have been created for Tour first and foremost either. Additionally, the timing and reasoning for them making such a change circa 2021/2022 has a pretty simple explanation. World's codenames heavily suggest that Rosalina's Ice World was initially planned for the game before being converted into Starview Peak, and given that course's structure it realistically would've been located in the portion of the map where Sky-High Sundae ended up, instead of Starview Peak's (which very intentionally acts as a landmark you can clearly make out from far away, which wouldn't really work for Rosalina's Ice World even if they did put it on top of that mountain for some reason). The codename not being the English title is not a contradiction either, as there would've been a very long period between the course being put into development for Tour and actually requiring them to come up with localized titles. The English title is also rather telling, given that "Sky-High Sundae" entirely ignores the implication of the Japanese name which is that these large ice cream structures are actually buildings, which Tour's low level of detail fails to illustrate well unlike the World version. If the World interpretation was already far into development at that point, I don't see why they wouldn't keep the city aspect in the name.

We don't really have any reason to believe that the lineup itself was all that rushed though. Incomplete clearly, but far from slapped together. The lineups for Wave 1 and 2 were already final, Wave 3 is very nearly identical, and the other waves are largely consistent in what they were trying to do. Additionally, there are only 3 courses we have any evidence were replaced later on, and the reasoning for those changes is also fairly simple. I explained Mushroom City already, but the blank courses were, as the prefixes imply, likely new non-city courses.

One of those would have of course been Piranha Plant Pipeline, which was likely the original Acorn Cup semifinal. This is the part where people tend to question why Piranha Plant Pipeline would be placed right before Piranha Plant Cove, but I alluded to the answer earlier with Sky-High Sundae. The course's development began long before they would've actually named the course in English, and by that point (probably in late 2022) it would've been out of the BCP lineup already, removing the need to account for that (and yes, the Japanese name for Pipeline has nothing to do with Piranha Plants).

The presumed reason they scrapped Pipeline from the BCP and didn't even end up creating that final non-city is also a simple one, they decided that Tour would stop receiving new content from September 2023, before the planned timing for Wave 6. With that in place, both Pipeline and this mystery non-city lost their purpose as marketable new courses (I imagine Pipeline still made the cut for Tour because they had budget for additional courses left over and it's a rather simple concept to execute). This would of course required some major changes to the latter half of Booster Course Pass, hence some of the changes to the placements of courses. Also, if you're wondering why they added Daisy Circuit and Rosalina's Ice World, those have simple explanations too. Daisy Circuit is a marketing play because Mario Kart Wii popular (source: the Wave 6 teaser trailer lol) and Rosalina's Ice World is the winter seasonal tie-in following the move of Vancouver to Wave 5. Though the city placements probably had more to do with how they ended up playing in 8 Deluxe, which they'd only have really gotten an idea of as they were figuring out the routing (which we do have reason to assume were worked out well in advance thanks to the Wave 2 music leak, which appears to have only included the music for courses in active development at the time [hence them putting that music into the game data early at all]. Sunset Wilds being there is what heavily implies they were trying to figure out the sunset gimmick, by the way).

@Grumblevolcano I don't doubt that they were thinking of new content to add to 8 Deluxe irregardless of the Expansion Pack, but the way the Booster Course Pass ended up is 100% because of it imo. Rushing out something as embarrassing as Wave 1 (note: I actually really like Wave 1, but come on) isn't something they'd realistically have done unless the timing was extremely strict. Needing another major benefit for the Expansion Pack (which was criticized heavily for lacking in content prior to the BCP announcement) before that fiscal year wrapped up, and one that would help keep people subscribed for a long period, definitely seems like that reason. But yeah, definitely possible that they had already wanted to do something for 8 Deluxe that the Expansion Pack coming along then made concrete.

Also yeah sorry for the non-NM tangents lol this is just kind of the one other thing I'm extremely knowledgeable (and spreadsheet-crazy) about so it gets me talking.