I love this new twist on BOTW hating called Elden Ring is better. They're both great games, and I love how they do things differently. Well alright folks, let's talk about durability and dungeons again.
To people complaining about weapon durability, I can sort of understand. It doesn't feel good when your weapon breaks, and they feel especially fragile compared to most other games. It conflicts with peoples' need to maximize efficiency and hoard resources, and weapons breaking is like precious damage dealing ability slipping through your fingers, but it serves a valuable gameplay function.
The other side of the coin is a system like Elden Ring or many other classic RPGs where you carry around your entire accrued arsenal and only end up using your main upgraded weapon and maybe one or two secondary weapons. I love the weapon variety to choose from in Elden Ring, but because of the weapon upgrade system you're actively discouraged from experimenting with other weapons because of stat requirements and damage output of raw weapons.
In BOTW I know that I tried every single weapon, and came to understand their niche uses and quirks, because I had to and the game made it not only necessary, but rewarding to experiment. Both systems have their strengths, some may prefer one or the other, but it's simply an intentional gameplay tradeoff.
As for dungeons I can also understand. The dungeon portions in BOTW are not as deep and puzzle based as in past Zeldas. People used to say BOTW had no dungeons, so it's at least encouraging to see that talking point has shifted. I have to admit though, the dungeons were never my favorite part of Zelda. Ocarina of Time was my first Zelda played to completion, and I remember wanting to hurry up and finish dungeons to get back out into the world and explore. To my taste, the divine beasts were good length and complexity, and the shrine puzzles were a fun little periodic diversion. It would have been great if they had more variety in their visual design, but it's obvious they focused their attention on the open world experience. I think perhaps another part of the reason why the dungeons are rather light is because they slow everything down, restrict link's abilities (climbing would break dungeons), and generally don't tap as deeply into the fun that the game offers through its philosophy of freedom.
Elden Ring has dungeons for days, and a comparatively weak open world when it comes to interactivity and freedom. It makes total sense to focus more on dungeons using the established souls gameplay formula. There seems to be an inherent tension between focusing on dungeons and focusing on an open world, they are opposite experiences. The players abilities, movement, etc should be tailored to each environment and what's fun in an open world can break a dungeon. Doesn't mean Elden Ring is better or worse than BOTW, they have different philosophies and they're difficult to compare directly.
Now it seems silly to participate in this tired discussion again, and take time to articulate these thoughts, because this has already all been hashed out before and the people that love BOTW love it, and the people that hate it, hate it. It just seems better to try to have the discussion than sling snarky one sentence remarks.