bender
What time is it?
Tedium makes it sound like its mandatory when its skippable optional content. If you want to 100% the game sure its tedium but thats the only reason you HAVE to do any of it. I say its a weak argument because the flip side is it need a variety of more content when its arguably the most content rich open world game in the past few years. Theres no example of a game with more unique content than elden ring in the open world genre outside of MMOs, so the flip side of the argument doesnt exist.
I think you are bit hung up on comparing it to other open worlds and enemy counts. Different open worlds have different design goals and the size of open world games varies greatly. There is no one shoe that fits all. I'm not saying it doesn't have more enemy/content variety than other open world games. I'm also not saying it needs more enemy types. I'm saying it could do with repeating what content it does have far fewer times. If you play open worlds to explore them, you are going to run into recycled content. And you probably aren't going to skip optional content if you are going in blind. The Souls games have traditionally been about being rewarded for checking every nook and cranny. And to me, that's the major failing of Elden Ring. There are far too many chests that you open that have a rune arc or other consumable and there are usually 3-5 different levels of each Talisman which was usually reserved for new game+ in the older Souls games. So if aren't using a guide and are looking to improve your build, you are going to slog though the same three (and that's being generous as I think the ice layout was only used once) optional dudgeon themes, to fight the same handful of boss types to open a chest that contains something you've probably seen before. It just feels a lot more copy and paste in some areas of content than previous entries where everything felt unique and/or useful.