Traversal's a huge weak point for BotW. It's slow and plodding. Running and horse riding don't feel half as good as they do in MGSV; climbing and gliding are nothing compared to gravity shifting, sliding or rocket parkour.
And that's without getting into the frustrating stamina meter or rain.
All you do in BotW is chores to make frustrating design choices less frustrating (like finding korok seeds to increase your inventory limit).
Just because it hides the chores, it doesn't mean they don't exist.
Did we play the same game?
I do feel like BOTW has ruined open world games for me (apart from the Witcher 3 and any rockstar game.) I even left it months after finishing zelda before I played horizon. The open world just feels so "gamey", things like the long grass you can hide in all looking exactly the same and being in neat little clumps. Why cant I just hide in any grass that looks long enough, why is that same grass in every environment.
Another thing with the climbing, you can only climb areas with yellow rope on them, it makes climbing boring.
The world just isn't interactive, it doesn't feel real even though it looks great. I want to see human enemy's using long grass against me, I want to then be able to burn that grass down, that isnt even advanced tech, we've had that since far cry 2. I want reasons to explore not just "oh there's an icon telling me to go over here".
I was playing last night in the devil's thirst and I saw the skyscraper with the vantage point, me being naive I thought I would be scaling the whole thing, climbing inside then climbing outside of it to get near the top ala assassin's creed/dying light. But instead it was 2 minutes maximum to the vantage point just following the yellow ropes, I wasn't even maybe quarter of the way up before I reached it.
I do think if I played it before Zelda I wouldn't have had as many problems with it and I'm hoping all these problems will be solved before horizon 2, I mean look at the difference between uncharted 1 and 2. As it stands now it's a good game, it's on the same level as the Ubisoft open world games but I just wish they took more chances instead of playing it safe.