I want to wander around messing around with sidequests, I don't want 80% of the game locked behind having to use incredibly boring and situational items in dungeons on gimmick objects to get past that secret path behind the town. Unless the reward for the dungeon is my own pet Loftwing or something that's a very hard sell for me.
You're making a lot of assumptions about what the items would be here and it leads me to believe you haven't played many Zeldas outside of the most recent ones, most notably TP which was the biggest offender of situational items. 2D Zelda have tons of items that are very useful in the Overworld, many of which should have been in BotW in fact.
Off the top of my head:
-Hookshot would have been great for climbing and combat
-Pegasus Boots to help you run faster. This is especially key since late game you're gonna be warping everywhere and you have no way to call forth a steed.
-The Glider should have been locked behind a dungeon. Honestly, I felt it was given away FAR too early. Made the world feel a lot safer than it should have been once you got it, since falling from heights no longer carried a risk after the first hour, and it opened up the map way too much far too early.
-Lens of Truth could have had a lot of functionality as well, especially in helping players to find secrets and stuff.
-Gust Jar was very well missed, and would have been a great replacement for Korok Leaves, and useful in combat, allowing you to suck up opponents and spit them back out at their allies.
-Ocarina would have been useful, or at least SOME sort of spell that gave you the Song of Storms or some way to change the weather, especially with how annoying the rain was in this game. Too many times I was stuck halfway up a mountain without being able to do anything but put my controller down for 5 mins.
-Goron Gauntlets, or something that let you pick up large boulders, and the like. Bonus points if you can pick up foes as well. Yes, I know we have magnesis, but it only works on metal objects, and that makes it awfully situational.
-Bombs should not have been a spell, and should have been craftable after you get a bomb bag. I would have LOVED to be able to make my own barrel bombs I can store away and roll down cliffs. Or bombs I could use stasis on to send flying into enemy camps. Have different bombs with different strengths and even varying effects depending on what you make them with, like Bombchus again, or electric bombs, Or balloon bombs, etc... Especially given all the Chu jelly you can find. Would have given that some use.
Weapon breaking seems like kind of a band-aid for the inevitable situation of someone on the internet going "Hey, THIS is the best weapon in the game!" and everyone swarming to use that and ignoring everything else before proceeding to shout "there's nothing I can do or find in this game!" because they refuse to use anything but the best and thus weapons no longer count as content. If there's a solution then it's worth at least examining to see if the flaws are worth any benefits, but just dismissing the issue entirely creates a completely different problem in trying to solve a more subjective one.
Simple. I can upgrade my weapons durability. If it breaks, it's not gone for good, and I can take it to a blacksmith to repair it for a price. If I find other weapons of a similar type in the wild, I can dismantle them to repair my own before it breaks.
The durability is still there, but I'm able to CHOOSE what I wanna use, and I'm encouraged to try new weapons, yet can still grow attached to whatever I like.
Weapon durability made Stasis, probably the most interesting spell, completely pointless as it'd just ruin my weapons.
And as for the villain, how does having small scale stakes work on a large scale map? Should it even be just one villain, then? Perhaps you should have one villain per dungeon then and make each nonlinear portion of the game it's own storyline or something. That would stretch the writers thin, but the alternative is stretching an already deliberately weak villain thin.
Have you played Oracle of Ages/Seasons? Or how about Adventure of Link? Both are smaller scale stories in contrast to the usual fair and don't feature Ganon as the main villain, yet feature a large interconnected world to explore. It doesn't stretch anyone thin, as a writer myself, all I can say is Nintendo needs to hire actual talent to write stories for them.
The Ghibli films often feature large worlds, yet tell very small and compelling narratives, for example.
Your way of thinking is too in a box, there are many ways to go about this. How about a more personal story about the people Link encounters on his journey? Or look at One Piece, arrive at place, **** is happening, learn about the people in this region, fix their problem, move onto the next area. That's actually what I thought BotW was gonna be, but it wasn't, outside of the four main regions, every other place was just kinda dull. Hell, look at the Witcher 3 and how IT handles ITS narrative. Even with a stand-in character like Link, a lot can still be done. And stand-in doesn't mean he can't have a personality anyway, look at WW Link for example.
Majora's Mask had the end of the world as it's stakes (at least ignoring the retcon that makes it all nothing but a dream) and it had 4 dungeons to deal with the smaller scale and time limit anyway. Zelda 2 had preventing the revival of Ganon as it's stakes which would go back to Ganon threatening the world and that being the stakes. Even those games had "saving the world" as a goal.
MM began as a very small personal story of Link trying to find Navi, and being transported to a parallel world. It began with him trying to return to his original form, and getting back Majora's Mask for the Mask Salesman. It was a very personal story, Hyrule wasn't in danger, he had no NEED to save these people, outside of it being his ticket out. It was Link's Quest. And the entire plot revolved around Skull Kid, and Majora, and the people of Termina. Not some big bad who is trying to conquer the world... for... some reason? Hell, Skull Kid's and Majora's motives even made sense within character, something that never ever does for Ganon outside of "I'm Evil." Even in OoT where he did it to save his people, it was still diluted into: "I'm evil."
Look at Link's Awakening, another good example. Or AoL, where he tried to resurrect one of the older princess Zelda's who'd been asleep for a long time, and trying to prevent Ganon from coming back, at the end, having to fight his own shadow as the main antagonist. That's a cool story, and open to a lot of interpretation, a lot could be done with such a premise. A lot more especially than "you are the chosen one, now collect these things, and go fight Ganon and SAAAAAAVE THE WORLD!!"
TASTE- oh wait but my teeth are already mostly cavitys
