WW ocean was a disguised load screen. Tho it was cool it has tesselation on Gamecube. Where TP had vast open empty areas...because.  Honestly traversing in TP felt far more tedious and pointless. When you make a world larger you should adjust traversal and they didn't balance it in TP.  WW at least had a million small islands to discover and treasure spots.

TP's traversal didn't bore me nearly as much as Wind Waker's sailing which nearly put me in a coma. Disguised loading screen or not, it just took way too long to get where I wanted to go.

Wind Waker is 2 thirds of an amazing game. It's got the Gamecube Nintendo-era problem of not being completed and rushed out however, so it's lacking content and has serious pacing issues in the final act. If it had a year more development time I think it could have been the best 3d Zelda, but it didn't. Other Zelda games get delayed a lot, but when they come out they're finished products.

Twilight Princess' Hyrule Field is too empty, but the way fast travel points are given to you you don't really have to set in it after a certain point. It ends up being there for certain setpiece battles on Epona or for story purposes like when you need to get Midna to Zelda.

It really didn’t though. There are 49 islands, the vast majority of which you’ll only need to visit for up to 5 minutes. There’s only four islands that have more than one purpose; Outset, Windfall, Dragon Roost and Forest Haven, then there’s a couple that you’ll only visit for it’s dungeon. The treasures are always nothing as well, except if you’re doing the Triforce quest, you can ignore every one of them because they’re almost always a handful of rupees which you don’t really need.

I’ve personally always found the Hyrule parts under the water to be by far the most interesting parts of The Wind Waker. In any case, Twilight Princess handily beats Wind Waker when it comes to total number of and degree of interesting locations. In fact, I’d say Wind Waker also comes up short to say Spirit Tracks in that regard.

Wind Waker strength lies in it’s presentation in terms of art direction and soundtrack, and in it’s charming story.

You could dissect any 3D Zelda game the same way.

Just saying

I don't think you can.  The ocean in Wind Waker presents unique challenges in the structure of the game that the land based Zelda games don't have.  Once I figured out there was one island per map square, it kind of cut my willingness to explore.  Yeah, there are also a handful of submarines and lookout platforms, but it felt more like a chore going to all these places and checking them off the list.  With the land based Zeldas, there could be a cave, or a hole, or a chest, or some other secret around any corner or under any rock.  Those just felt more organic to me.  Whereas in the ocean, everything was just oddly spread out.  You pretty much knew you were going to find one cool thing on each island.  With a major exception being Windfall Island, which was absolutely crammed full of side quests.  It would have been better for pacing if there was another island that had lots of stuff to do.  Or even if places like Dragon Roost, Forest Haven, or Outset had more to do instead of so much at Windfall.

At least traversal wasn't a problem in Skyward Sword, at least not for me; the ground areas were densely packed and flying in the sky took relatively little time.

I really don't like SS at all but I am glad it exists because BOTW is the response to its criticisms.

I came to apreciate SS much more after BotW

In hindsight, the biggest importance Twilight Princess has for the franchise is that it allowed the fandom to finally move past Ocarina of Time. It scratched the 'mature adult Link' itch enough that future games were allowed to experiment more with their art styles and change up the formula more.