So it sounds like you have contacts with console licensers and a professional art studio and (I presume) some professional programmers, but you and the art studio have some different creative ideas about the system and the gameplay?
So first of all, congratulations, because you're playing on the level that most people here merely dream of, and second of all, it's hard to give you good advice since I know nothing about the nitty-gritties of developing for proprietary consoles as opposed to PCs.
But I do know that it's a very extensive and expensive process (much moreso, from what I understand, if you use true 3D instead of 2D because everything, in both a graphics and gameplay sense, needs to be able to scale to different angles, distances, and orientations, and the "camera" requires a lot more logic to work well), and, like others here have said, if your end goal is a console release, you will want to abandon RPG Maker. It produces a standalone .exe that plays on PCs (and can be integrated with Steam) but can't port to consoles. Even if you did want to go to Steam only, RPG Maker is probably not the greatest platform for what you seem to want to do. It can handle action elements with some scripting effort, but it doesn't do so in a particularly precise or smooth manner and it checks collisions by a sprite's location rather than whether its
pixels have collided.
(And with that being said, I would assume most super-small console developers would have game development costs somewhere from $250,000 to $1,000,000 - way more than using RPG Maker or GameMaker or Unity or the like, so I hope you have a lot of money on hand, or that you're splitting the costs and profits with your other stakeholders! But I could be way off. Do some searching and see if you can find more accurate estimations for how much developing your game might cost.)
I suppose if your only concern is that you would have liked to use RPG Maker since you're comfortable with it, I'd advise you defer to Polywick on this one. But you have sort of suggested that they want to create something somewhat different than what you have in mind (3D vs. 2D, and different engine), so unless they are a big stakeholder in your project that are helping you in other ways besides simply getting paid to produce graphics for you, you might want to find someone else that can meet your needs more closely. Then again, I just visited their website, and it looks like they also do 2D graphics, so maybe they
can do what you want as long as you stay firm in your request?
Some people have suggested making a "prototype" first, which I assume would be done so that you can make sure the project is feasible before you invest way too heavily in any one particular thing. If the structure of the project is set up so that you're at the head of it and you're paying everybody a salary for their work on your game, then you definitely want to do this. If it's set up so that they studios themselves are taking on most of the financial risk, and don't need much money from you until the you start making revenue, then a prototype is
still a good idea as it will help you present your game to further investors and hired talent (you might be able to make a prototype for $25K instead of $500K, and can use that prototype to raise further money for the large project), but it becomes a little less necessary to you from a development standpoint.
I guess in the end you have to take everything I say here with a grain of salt since I've never been in a position with as much to gain or lose as you are (and I don't think too many members of RMW have). It wouldn't be a bad idea to try to find someone who works in the console game industry that has worked on a game you respect, and reach out to them - just let them know you're a fan of their work, give them a two-line summary of the situation you're in and ask if it would be okay if you ran a few questions about game-making by them because you're in need of some good advice.
