I prefer TOTK, I just see TOTK as everything I love about BOTW but more and better. I found myself really enjoying the ultrahand ability especially in the shrines, I felt like solving puzzles felt more satisfying just building even simple things with the ultrahand. I like the dungeons more, while they're still far from the Zelda dungeons in older entries, they felt more improved in that they felt more isolated and even the lead up to the dungeons felt more satisfying in TOTK navigating through a challenging path to get there. More to explore too with more shrines, underground islands, and sky islands, ect...

But I could see why people would prefer BOTW just cause of the magic it brought playing a revolutionary game like that for the first time, TOTK while improved in almost every way compared to BOTW, probably wouldn't wow people as much since it's primarily the same formula.

Well, for me BotW is 7 (Good), TotK is 6.5 (between Descent and Good).
They are both centered around "overworld" exploration and BotW has more sense of exploration, despite having actually less to see (I won't get into why TotK fails at exploration, my user review of TotK for anyone interested is there somewhere).

They are neither based on original goal designs of LoZ, which was not "overworld" exploration, but Labyrinth (aka Dungeon) exploration, though addition of overworld is indeed what made it even better than original concept of "get into Labyrinths from the main screen" (very simple comparison from recentish days is Demon's Souls vs Dark Souls).

Eventually, Nintendo maybe figures out why TotK will end up selling quite a bit less than BotW on a vastly bigger user base and try to go into different direction with LoZ then one they are headed now.

I was going to type a response but figured it was easier to just agree because you nailed it for me.  Other than I have finished Tears.

As a game Tears is better, it's an improvement over Breath. More polished with better mechanics. It's also bigger and with better puzzles. If you play it before Breath then it's the best game out of 2

But talking about my own experience, Breath was a much more impactful game. The sense of wonder and discovery in BOTW was many times better. For a game that rely on exploration and experiencing the world BOTW trumps TOTK simply because it was my first contact with Hyrule

TOTK is an incredible game, but BOTW is two degrees above it from both enjoyment and artistic perspective

I'll go with BOTW

I think Tears is a better game. But, I wasn't expecting so much from BotW, so when it was an amazing game, it probably hit me with greater "wow" factor.

No, it is not “plain obvious”.

TotK is bloated and not as cohesive as BOTW was. More doesn’t equal better. There’s a balance to be had when designing anything, and Nintendo tried to tackle the problem of familiarity and their use of the same map by bloating the game’s world.

Tears did improve a lot of things, but not everything.

Durability is a bit better in TotK thanks to the fuse system. However the UI still feels it was designed for the WiiU gamepad, designed for touch screen controls. It worked in BotW yet in TotK so much stuff is added that it becomes very unwieldy and you end up only using a few things as the only useful sort is on most used or most damage for fuse.

Also the sages were more a liability in TotK than any help. The AI keeps putting them in your way, often screwing up what you're doing. The champion abilities in BotW were much better.

TotK also lacks challenge, gets very easy after the start. The end battle is more epic in TotK even though it still falls flat if you leave it too long. Enemies scale better in TotK, however it's still just adding a bigger health bar to the enemies. Plus the OP puff shrooms and muddle buds make every encounter rather trivial. Or you can simply summon an array of beam emitters and sterilize any camp in seconds. The only decent combat was in the proving grounds. And the Guardians were awesome in BotW, nothing like that in TotK.

Story delivery was a disaster in TotK. Far too easy to get big plot points spoiled early by finding things out of order. The memories were done better in BotW than the tears in TotK. Plus Link keeping his mouth shut while he already knows everything just felt stupid. At least the game acknowledges it at one point.

Well you never asked and I can't volunteer information. Got it about 100 hours ago...

TotK is the better sandbox, BotW is the better action rpg and survival sim.
I enjoyed both immensely, even though BotW left a bigger impact.

BOTW if I had to choose but I enjoyed them both.

The short version is that I find them about equal with BotW excelling in exploration and TotK excelling in gameplay, but if I have to choose I go Tears of the Kingdom. It's a slighly more flawed game I would say, but also more fun in the direct sense.