When Wind Waker was first revealed this lead to years of Celda cries and calls for Miyamoto's head on a spike.
It then became a series favourite.
There's really no reason to cancel the game if the only reason is "people don't like how it looked".
It's also not even the same thing. Metroid, from the very first title, was very deliberately intended to be dark and unsettling on all levels, across all aspects. Zelda, despite fans constantly wishing for a "gritty and mature" title, never had that. It was cartoonish from the beginning, and while OoT and MM skewed into darkness, both were often bright, colorful, and quirky. Wind Waker always meshed well with the franchise and its history. So already it's a false equivalence.
But even further than that, Wind Waker is, from a gameplay standpoint, very thoroughly a Zelda game through and through. Federation Force, at least last we saw it, is a linear, level-based game. That description is literally the antithesis to a Metroid game.
Combine all this with the fact that it doesn't feature Samus (Wind Waker definitely features Link), and more importantly that there hasn't been a Metroid game in coming on 6 years or a Metroid Prime game in 9 years (compared to 2 years for the Oracle games and 3 years for Majora) you have a very, very different situation.
Plus, the status of the Zelda series had never been anything close to fragile. Other M missed Nintendo's sales expectations and the series got put on ice for 6 years. What happens if this fails? Is the cord pulled again? Could we be looking at a situation like Chibi-Robo or Fire Emblem where a single game failing could mean the difference between the series continueing on or not? At least for the foreseeable future? Or on the flip side, what happens if it's a huge success? The franchise is in a position where such a situation could massively alter the series trajectory.
