Wind Waker was Excellent. Twilight Princess was great with one really shitty recurring element. Skyward Sword is Great and has Groose people just overly bitch about the motion controls because 90% of people have it set up wrong and the other 6% refuse to give motion controls the time of day despite playing a system dedicated to them.Wow, that sounds pretty cringe. If it was a few easter eggs or references, it would be fine but 17 of those things sounds pretty dumb
The couples mask is like the only pain in the ass mask to get and you never needed to go all autistic and collect every mask in the game. Getting the Fierce Deity Mask is kind of shit because while its cool to obliterate the final boss, it really trivializes it to the point that you just don't notice it. Had the same experience with all the bosses in BOTW. Game devs clearly didn't consider bomb arrow damage and availability. I can't remember any of the bosses because I just kept bomb arrows for bosses and proceed to kill them before I saw any mechanics.
That's not a tall order. BOTW was coming off of the heels of Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess, probably the two weakest entries in the 3D style.
I'd go into detail shitting on TOTK but its become so tedious as that game is. I will say that the biggest crime of BOTW and TOTK is that the shrines are largely at least somewhat interesting puzzles but they ended up taking too much development from the dungeons, causing those to feel lackluster.
The handheld games had a better track record of quality games than the mainline 3D era. It's why I have somewhat interest in Echoes of Wisdom because A Link Between Worlds was a pretty great classic style Zelda.
Yeah the shrines were a mistake especially with how many there are but it is fun speed running the dungeons with unintended solutions like just flying to the end.