What I want to know is why was Twilight Princess nearly devoid of magic?

I really hope they put more content into Zelda Wii than they did in Twilight Princess. Twilight Princess had a large yet fairly empty overworld, with few sidequests and fewer interesting items compared to past games (the spinner was cool, but it was useless outside of a few preset scenarios). The dungeons were pretty darn good (arguably the best of the 3D Zeldas), though the bosses were somewhat unoriginal (giant piranha plant? yeah, we've never seen THAT in a Nintendo game before).

It's pretty hard to top the dungeons found in the Ocarina of Time, the sidequests found in Majora's Mask, or the bosses found in either (Bongo Bongo!). They both had a wealth of cool items to use, as well. I hope Zelda Wii manages to blend the concepts of its four predecessors into something more marvelous than we've ever seen before.

The dungeons overall were well done in Twilight Princess - though lacking in difficulty.  But TP has the distinction of having the worst dungeon in any 3D Zelda game - the Palace of Twilight.  What a pushover piece of shit!

I'm not sure about whether that is regarded as a proper dungeon. It doesn't fit.

Palace of Twilight definitely counts as a dungeon. And there are easier dungeons in the Oracle games.

Life is a dungeon.

This is all getting too complicated for me... I'll just play my Zelda games and enjoy them, and stop worrying what would be considered a dungeon and what not.

At the risk of being a major buzzkill, it isn't really unusual for a game to lose content during the course of production. It actually happens all the time. I mean, we even have a complete and separate game that came to just because all the ideas the team had couldn't fit in OoT.

I can't remember if it was Miyamoto or someone else who said that he was the least satisfied with Zelda II, because it turned out just like he had planned.