We all have opinions sure but if BOTW didn't do a good job at emergent gameplay then that quite frankly means no game has given that the tonnes of videos highlighting the reality to be the opposite to that view. The lock and key structure is what held the series back and I say that as a long time fan since the early days and the irony is that BOTW'S freedom returns the series to what made the very first game fascinating.
It was never dungeons and such it was the free sense of adventure and this is what really got lost in the series and why it's mainstream appeal was limited. Nintendo mistook the lock and key structure as what made the series and as a result the series became an expanded dungeon crawler rather than the free adventure it started out as and they started to realise this back with SS.
BOTW rightly returned the franchise to what it started out as and put a template in place to maintain that, rather than a lock and key structure that limits and restricts the adventure and gameplay we have the free open adventure that allows the player to tailor the adventure more to their liking than a rigid structure that doesn't budge.
