People bitching about broken weapons have no idea what they're talking about. Dispelling some ignorance:

1. There are blacksmiths in the game.
2. The 6 story weapons can be repaired by said blacksmiths, or self-repair.
3. Anything else is not unique. You may love it, but there are other fish in the sea. If there is a standard weapon you really like, there is a spot (or many spots) in the world where a monster has it or guards it and re-spawns every blood moon. Explore, find it, and then you can use it (but not only it) for the whole game.
4. No good weapon breaks after 2 goblins. If you think it does, you're playing the wrong game. Most weapons can take out two mini-armies of goblins. Bosses sometimes take two or three weapons to kill.
5. The goal of weapon degradation isn't just to get you to mix up your weapons, but also to mix up your play style. Each scenario can be dealt with in multiple ways. Stealth and unique strategy using your surroundings are strongly encouraged. Barging in with brute force will burn through weapons. Shooting explosives with fire arrows or dropping a metal box on an archer will mean that one weapon could last you an entire play session.

There are four blacksmiths in the game.  They repair the 5 story weapons you get in the game.  They take diamonds to repair.  I wouldn't be surprised if you're right though, the lesser gems were probably for fixing lesser items and they eventually said, why bother?  It would slow down the game.

GE007 sucked too because the guns ran out.

That makes no sense one bit. Having black smiths in Hyrule would be the MOST lucrative job in the country, period. The Goron and Gerudo would be the logical choices for these jobs. In 100 years people would of taught themselves. Or grew up knowing already what to do. That's a bullshit excuse and you know it. Forcing people to "experiment" with other weapons is a bad reason for the degrade system. You know what really happens. People just exploit the game and farm for the quickest weapons. Than just ignore the rest.

I never used the Bomberrang, for example. I hardly used anything. Besides the few weapons that respawn at common places. I beat the game fine. I didn't care about learning the weapons. Because I can't save them. So the reason why they wanted me to "experiment" with weapons. Was the reason why I DIDN'T experiment. I care about having fun. The degrade system was not apart of that. I'd take the Master Sword being blocked off in the tradtional sense. So it be unlimited. Over free rain of the map. What's the point of the hearts limit on in anyway? The sword breaks and you have to wait 30 minutes. Shouldn't of than been enough to allow the sword to be gotten, right at the start. Either block it off like a normal game. Or don't. None of this half shit.

Overreliance on icons/radar/markers kills inmersion/fun/focus (in what the game does best).

When my first KF7 Soviet ran out... I uninstalled the game and wrote an angry letter to James Bond himself. Bullshit.

You are saying that creating weapons as a job would be a great way to earn money?

In a world where Swords can break after a single pack of mobs are defeated....

But there are enough swords in the world to kill everything in the world 5000 times over?

You can't cut down a tree in the game without it turning into 5 types of weapon, how do you think a blacksmith could ever sell you a sword when it rains them in this world? I mean the truth of why there is weapons everywhere is shown in the flash backs to 100 years before the game started, War happened, and it was nasty, lots of people took up weapons.... and those people lost heavily, they were massacred, people in Breath of the wiild seem to be far keener to start off learning how to do things like farm food and create villages again... not pick up the weapons of the dead who died holding them at the hands of Ganon.

I loved the weapon degredation system personally, it kept things fresh since I couldn't just find one good weapon and brute force my way through every encounter, I had to keep changing things up and deciding which weapons to use for each scenario. It wasn't so much about adding realism as in adding strategy and variety.

Likewise, the lack of xp is a good thing in my book. Too many games I feel use xp as a crutch. Not every game needs it and in a game like Zelda I reckon it would feel forced and tacky.

Agreed. Having an out-of-place icon pop up every five minutes to pat me on the head for performing some arbitrary task would have been horribly immersion-breaking in a game like Botw.

So the goal of the game is to max out your inventory so you can fill it up with identical weapons since they break so quickly? :p Not a very adventurous collection of tools there...

The first time I found a fire wand I thought cool, I'm going to play with that. Less than a minute later, poof gone. So the next one I got I only used for starting camp fires. How's that encouraging experimentation! Since I didn't want to use teleportation and was stuck with 8 weapon slots for the first 80 hours, I never got to try out elemental weapons where they would be beneficial. It was no use carrying them out of the desert or mountains taking up valuable inventory space only to break after a couple of fights.

I ended up with an inventory full of x5 Lynel bows and pretty much that picture up there. Why bother will elemental counter attacks or other inventive ways to kill things when a couple Lynel or Guardian weapons will do the trick. Whatever it set out to do with weapon degradation, it still failed at it.

He gave a shout out to Dragon's Dogma. He's cool with me.