I dunno. I still think quite highly of Inafune (despite things obviously not having gone well for him after departing Capcom), but I think the Mega Man franchise could absolutely carry on without him.
Problem is, it sure seems like there is still some bad blood and so Mega Man has remained shelved. Or maybe MM11 just didn't pull CRAZY numbers like they were hoping? In fairness, with Capcom seemingly doing more in-house development (which is a good thing), they're probably quite picky about which projects they work on. And Mega Man simply isn't going to be a major IP for them moving forward.
It kind of feels like they've killed the franchise, and resurrecting it would take some genuine effort. And who knows if anyone at Capcom even cares enough to take on that kind of responsibility?
Given the Battle Network Collection's incredible sales, though, I could maybe see that giving some modicum of hope to the franchise. It might not be a bad idea to "reboot" the series slightly, a new 3D action-platformer in the Classic series, but maybe working in something like the Battle Chip systems from the Battle Network games. Keep the art style fun and vibrant, maybe bring back the writers from the Archie comics to give us a story that's fun, but sets up some genuine stakes (maybe planting seeds to loosely approximate whatever happened between the Classic and X series'), I dunno.
The time for a new Mega Man game would definitely be now, though. Your biggest audience for those games are definitely going to skew older gamers looking for nostalgia, so keeping elements that worked, but "rebooting" it for newer gamers, would probably be the series' best bet.
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