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I'm not here to change your mind, but to agree with you. BotW was a huge disappointment and I stopped playing it after 10-20h (guessing) and I did the first divine beast (the mammoth). I didn't even bother with TotK because I had no desire to get that disappointment again.
First, I'll say that I play Zelda games for the dungeons. I want to go to cool places, solve fun puzzles, and get neat items that unlock more puzzles. I'm not interested in the world, which is really just connective tissue between the actual good parts of the game (though some games have more interesting overworlds than others). So right off the bat, BotW was off on the wrong foot. Only four dungeons? Not a good sign. But the shrines do exist, so I figured that might make up for it.
Turns out that the shrines don't really do it for me at all. They are so short that right as I'm getting into the groove and having fun, it's all over. Additionally, as you get all the items at the beginning of the game they don't engage you in new ways the way other Zelda games do. On top of that, the one divine beast I did (the actual dungeon!) was super short and simple. It took me maybe 20-30 minutes. So the main draw of Zelda for me was a big fat bust.
On top of that, the game screwed up one of the other things I love about Zelda, which is the music. Most Zelda soundtracks are packed with bangers, so I figured that I'd like the music at least. But no, it's all ambient piano shit. I know opinions vary, but ambient music is fucking boring. It was awful having to listen to that everywhere I went. I know they recorded real music for the game, it was in some of the trailers. But I never heard it when I played. Huge letdown.
On top of all that, I hated traversing the world. Ostensibly the main draw of the game, I found it to be both unreasonably big, and devoid of anything interesting. So not only were the shrines and dungeons not very good, they were connected by a painful slog through the world every time I wanted to get to one. The world, by itself, would have put a serious damper on my opinion of the game. But when it wasn't firing on any other cylinders either, it was unbearable.
Overall, I rate BotW 2/5 stars at best. It's beautiful to look at, and the physics are fun, but there's nothing interesting there in the long run. It's a terrible Zelda.
Edit: oh yeah I forgot to mention the equipment durability system. It fucking sucks (as all such systems do). People hated it in Skyward Sword, so why on earth did Nintendo think it was a good idea to bring it back? And from what I've heard it's even worse because it applies to the Master Sword (albeit just disabling it temporarily rather than destroying it). At least in SS, they had the sense to make the iconic Hylian Shield exempt from the durability system. If they had to keep durability (which they shouldn't have), they at least should've made the Master Sword similarly exempt.
This is much more defensible than calling it a terrible game.
I loved it, 5/5, one of the best games ever, the "Skyrim for kids" I'd been hoping for ever since I had kids ... but it's a very different gameplay genre from most Zelda games and I can't begrudge bigger Zelda fans for resenting seeing it published under the "Legend of Zelda" name.
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