Mile wide, inch deep fits the game play loop in TotK. There is tons and tons of stuff to do, but nothing on its own feels all that great. The sum is definitely greater than the parts as the parts themselves have many issues. The game works since you constantly do different things and that's likely why they kept the temples short and in segments, shrines even shorter. It's all served in bite sized lukewarm portions, the buffet is enormous and never ending so you can always pick the next tasty morsel.

While I enjoy the game a lot, the actual wow moments are not really there. BotW had them plenty yet TotK doesn't get beyond "that's pretty clever" but you can simply do this instead... And yeah the building. I get ideas, try some stuff for a while than run into the limitations of the game again. Either something disappears, breaks, stuff interferes messing things up or the controls and camera make it impossible. Plus you can never save, try something and go back to an earlier stage of any project. Auto build history doesn't help much, just soaks up resources. I rather have an undo option while building.

As for breakable weapons, it gets ridiculous in Gerudo. The weapons there make attachments stronger but reduce durability. There are tons of Gibdos around whose bones are good to fuse to weapons, yet it only lasts one hit lol.

I do wonder if I'm still playing it for fun or just for convenience. I have FF16 ready to play (and many other games) but it's always easier to turn Zelda back on than to get into a new game. Plus I still want to see the rest of the good parts.

Yea i'm just playing it to finish it. I mainly play in handheld cause i can play it for 5 hours at work. I did the water temple and fire temple so i must have 30 hours left i think.

This genuinely boggles my mind. Why would you ever have one-hit fuse items if the process of fusing is such a convoluted mess? I think one-hit items would be pretty cool if there was a way to quickly fuse them like you do with arrows for example, but as it is they're totally useless, ain't no way I'm gonna go through that whole process every time.

You can get it down to 5 button presses :/
Up arrow, X to drop (assuming you're using the same thing as last time), LB + down on left analog control stick, Y.
But indeed useless in combat, no time to throw things on the ground and fuse them again.

I find myself avoiding combat more and more, just going for the shrines now and heading to the Lomei maze. The Akala one was fun, Gerudo one next. The Gerudo temple quest had me back tracking again so I wandered off again lol.

I never got used to using the quick menu for dropping items as in the few times I tried it, I didn't get the timing right because the game takes a while to load things or whatever. And also the quick menu isn't exactly quick for finding what you want to find most of the time. Either way yeah even if it's "only" 5 button presses, you still gotta time them carefully.

I'm sure they made it convoluted like this exactly for it to be useless in combat, to make it so the player needs to prepare. Which I kinda respect, but there are better ways to do that than make the whole thing massively inconvenient, and even then, it's really inconsistent for the game to be stingy like this with weapon fusing but keep the "pause to heal infinitely" mechanic.

You sort of answered your own question. The Gibdo bones are incredibly useful when fused to arrows. They are far from useless.

Fair enough, I pretty much only ever fused elemental fruits to arrows.

True, 5x savage Lynel bow, bullet time, why ever use melee weapons! No clue how long that bow lasts, I used it for a Geelock and just leave it now in case of another hard boss encounter. Actually I'm just avoiding combat in general now. The encounters don't feel fun, more like an exchange of materials. Invest X of Y to get A, B and maybe C. Then rebuild weapons again and find new bow(s). The game starts reminding me more and more of Factory simulator, upgrading materials to higher value ones, except you're doing it all manually and got to repair/replace your machinery all the time!

South Lomei maze is fun, no enemies! Maybe in the Depths part, left it there last night. I wonder if it will let me out and into the Depths. It did in the Akala Lomei maze but that's just a small pocket. Here I'm staring out the gate to my familiar domain :) It's raining today so I'll go get that Flux Construct in the maze. They were fun at first, overused as everything else, but at least relatively 'cheap' in resources to take down.

TotK is more of an economic sim! "Zelda: The last worker", would work as a title :)

The game would be so much better without the blood moon repopulating everything all the time. Then I would approach it like Might and Magic back in the day and have an incentive to rid the world of enemies. It felt so satisfying to clear zones in Might and Magic, it feels so disheartening to get a blood moon right after clearing a camp and they're all back again. Plus people abuse the mechanic, having memorized where all the powerful stuff respawns after a blood moon and teleport around for their shopping lists... It very much backfires on the idea that breakable weapons should promote more experimentation.

Yep, of all the minor annoyances in this game, "when the blood moon rises" makes me literally see red. Eff you Zelda and your red moon cycle. "In ancient times, the red moon cycle was associated with shamanism, high priestesses, and healers. Those who tend to menstruate with the full moon are said to focus their “darker” and more creative menstrual energies outward, rather than inward, in order to nourish and teach others from their own experience." Not repopulate the world with monsters!

Maybe one day there will be a mod to disable the blood moon and it will finally be possible to actually finish the game :)

Apparently that mod already exists for BotW and there was even a glitch that allowed you to bypass the blood moon without any respawns? Wonder if the glitch still works. Either way I imagine someone will make that mod.