Rain is fine, disabling climbing, instantly putting out your camp fire (so you can't sleep / wait) and extinguishing bomb arrows, not fine. I didn't get to deal with rain until 60 hours in since I went south after the plateau, first clearing all of the desert, then the mountains and didn't see rain until I got to Ridgeland tower. Luckily I already had the gale ability and a lot of stamina, but still some simple climbs were rendered impossible. Got to wait, no dry spot for a camp fire, circle around wait for the rain to stop.

I never used fast travel in my play through so was intend on clearing a section at a time to minimize back tracking. That made the rain very annoying at times, especially in places where you need a bomb arrow to shoot a wall to get inside a cave.

Weapons breaking was annoying as well but mostly due to the very limited inventory space. Since I went the other way I didn't meet the korok seed dude until 80 hours in and played all that time with 8 inventory slots.... No good when you sometimes need 5 weapons for one Lynel...

I see rain as more of an obstacle. These have always existed to varying degrees in Zelda games. Sure it can be an annoyance to wait, but it doesn't negatively impact my enjoyment of the game even after hundreds of hours. There are also many areas where it doesn't rain, but my typical "hang-out" region is in a rain forest =D

Should there be an option to bypass rain? I think that kind of defeats the point of the rain, but I think a good idea would be to have spells or potions that can eliminate the effects of rain, temporarily. Although, I think taking too much of the struggle out of the game really hurts one of the best elements of the game: it's not a wonder that playing minimalist quests (the ones that strip you down to few abilities and fresh for items) are among the most rewarding.

the rain never really bothered me and I played with the hud off as I usually do in most games i play

My problem isn't the rain. My problem is that it rains every 2 in-game days.

Depends on the biome. It only rains very frequently in a small percentage of the overall map. About 30% it rains infrequently, some rain permanently until an event is done, and in about half the map there is no rain at all.

It does rain in Skyward Sword, I remember it doing so once you enter than giant cloud dome and have to solve that puzzle to get into the building where you find out about the three pieces of the Goddess Song.

There seems to have been a misunderstanding here. I don't remember saying anything to warrant this kind of a response. I'm not attacking you, I'm merely comparing our different experiences. Why the hostility?

lol that's terrible, sort of like suggesting that if you're fighting someone in street fighter who knows how to block the only way you know how to attack then you just put down the controller and wait for him to get bored beating you.

You can climb literally anything in the game in any weather, the game gives you tools such as the climbing gear which after 2 upgrades means the leap up walls takes little to no stamina and on top of that cooking something like an apple + endura carrot will completely refill stamina and give you extra, you can have 60 meals with you which allow you to completely refill your stam wheels which can be eaten as you climb. (that said, any of the largest mountains in the game feature snow towards their peak and never rain, at most you'll need 2x yellow stam foods to climb anything in rain)

If you're putting the controller down and waiting for the game to remove the obstacle rather than learning how to overcome it then you've missed a part of the game design.

I didn't know that.

Thing to remember about SS not having rain and how that might seem unrealistic... is that it wouldn't be realistic to have rain when the majority of the clouds are under your game world

That does raise other questions of course... but still, less rain would be expected when floating above the clouds (most of them)

That's where we're going to differ. It continuously broke the flow of my exploration and forced breaks more than once.