RE Veronica Producer confirms WHY they chose Code: Veronica as the next remake:
When I asked the producer why not remake RE1 before Code: Veronica he said that when Capcom asked the dev team which game they wanted to remake after they finished working on RE4R, they said that RE4 was the continuation of Leon's story after RE2, and now they wanted to go back and develop the continuation of Clair's story after the events of RE2 so that the story of RE2's 2 protagonists felt complete.