Oh no, translating isn't the hard part. It's getting the text into a game that's the hard part, especially on an NES/Famicom, whose expansion can be hell if you have no clue what you're doing, and even then, be prepared for the possibility of having to rearrange tons of crap if you mess with the mapper. So most of the people without some basic ASM skills run away after a little bit of tinkering. Hell, I even left it when there were forced pointers used in the dialog--I wasn't about to jump through hurdles for a fun hack or two.
Generally, as systems become more advanced, the developers are more lazy :p It's easier to utilize better hardware and lazy compressions and whatnot (the GBA's internal compression being spamed in tons of games is a good example of this) when they're repeatedly used, while on the NES, some things were the same one day and radically different the next
