Nice.

The divine beasts still serve as ‘checks’ throughout the game. Especially since they prepare you for Hyrule Castle. Its all connected, granting you more abilities, taking out one of the bosses earlier, seeing how strong you are at the current point compared to the bosses. And weakening Ganon, of course

Hyrule Castle may be the final main area and the primary reason to explore, but the DBs are as well and connect directly to Hyrule Castle to begin with. What you want is what BOTW already does, just with dungeons you prefer or, rather, what you would call ‘actual dungeons’.

I don’t recall anyone quitting BOTW over a divine beast because 

1) They’re short

2) They’re not frustrating

3) You can skip them if you want to anyway

Past games, I tend to hear people getting stuck and quitting in massive, frustrating dungeons like the Water Temple. I think this would happen less with shorter dungeons and I believe BOTW has proven that. Certainly helps that you can skip them, too.

45 minutes is too long and padded. More of them + 30 minutes max seems like a better compromise. 

If too many people skip them they become clutter in the games much like many of the menu items in prior games had little use outside of a few and it's not a case of players being dumb to figure them out many players just either don't like them or find them overall not that enjoyable being an option means they have to add to the game for the main bulk of players still and if people are put off by the option then it has to be scaled back or removed.

personally, I can't imagine going back to the old style anymore.  Even Skyrim is annoying to me with the lack of freedom to climb...tho Link is arguably toooo good at climbing. It migt be the first 3D game I have played where I don't feel like my character always gets unfairly stuck on random objects and invisible walls.

I was about to call you a something or other, yet then I saw the name. Sure, Zelda without puzzles, turn it into TR reboot. Make the puzzles optional and increase the kill count. Mindless killing is much better than figuring something out :)

Imo BotW needed more and longer dungeons and more puzzle shrines instead of the same challenge fights repeated over the map. The thing I never really enjoyed about Zelda games are the scripted boss fights with start from scratch if you fail in stage 3. 

Longer dungeons give you a break from the over world which will feel nice to return to again afterwards and catch up on what's happened outside. With shrines you pop in and out, not much more than checking off the next item on a list. Sure a lot of them were fun, and I did spend 170 hours on BotW. (Never used fast travel, most of it spend exploring and running) I was however a bit disappointed with the end. Just like in Windwaker I felt it still needed a meaty dungeon at the end, not just the old repeat of boss fights. I did explore Hyrule castle early though and when I finally got back to it I simply ran to the boss and the game was done...

Yeah, lot of games have problems with vertical traversal - but for me BotW is quite broken due to how easy is to climb anything.
Climbing should come at high price, as deliberate and one of defining choices for your character, that takes lot of XP/points, making in turn a lot of other skills not developed so well, as well as not being able to wear heavier armor while climbing - at least that's how it should be implemented in proper RPGs - unfortunately, those are quite rare these days, and are almost exclusively in realm of pen&paper RPGs.

Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion all had skills that governed jumping and climbing, making your character able to go to areas and find paths that would otherwise be inaccessible - which is very point of having those skills in game in the first place.

Yes very much so. Was recently playing Yonder the Cloud Caching Chronicles and man did I notice how much I wanted to be able to do stuff like climb and the paraglide. Invisible walls, 2 foot ledges you can't go up. Forced paths, ect. It really takes the open out of open world.

They somehow managed to make BotW completely open world, where you can go anywhere anytime and yet somehow never feel OP or underleveled at the same time. Getting certain abilities made certain areas become more skippable per say, but the way they made the world, you found yourself going back to places or not wanting to skip areas anyway.

Nintendo has shown mastery over many genres, but its accomplishment with BotW might be its most impressive. On its first try with a modern open-world game, it basically set the new standard. 

What standarad would that be?

Oh man, I'm sorry for the delay. This week has been crazy.

I'd say BotW set a benchmark for open-world games in terms of physical/mechanical/chemical freedom, locomotion options, and emergent gameplay.