Hey Thomas,
I'll first preface this by stating this is only my opinion, and I'm saying this with all due respect, as I greatly appreciate the work you did on Ori and I'm looking forward to what's next.
I also hope this won't feel/read as a personal attack, even though many of these comments are about personal attitude and viewpoints (or what I understand and perceive as such)
With that said, I believe you're approaching all of this with the wrong mindset as evident from your OP and following replies since (also, your Hollow Knight comments), and you're not trying to analyze your experience as designer trying to learn from the game, but rather a player forcing your own design thoughts and looking at what doesn't work according to your own expectations.
First, I'm impressed that after barely two weeks, you've already completed the game with all shrines, all memories and most sidequests. I don't know how many hours you've played, but that still means you must have played for an extensive amount of time over a very short period, which is, in my eyes, doing in huge disservice for most games, and something we as critics should take the time to consider when discussing game experiences. To make a crude metaphor: I feel you're complaining about the taste of a glass of wine after having gulped the entirety of it in a single swallowing motion. Somebody earlier in the thread made an analogy about slow rhythm films, and I'd go one further and say playing this game (as many others) too much over too little time would be like binge watching slow movies. Of course you're not going to appreciate their rhythm with that cadence of viewing, that's not what they were built for. We as players have a tendancy to obsess over consuming the content offered to us in as little time as possible, and I feel it's doing a disservice to the medium at large not to consider what that kind of (excessive?) consumption means. In essence, I'd argue going too fast to play a game, any game, isn't enjoying it, it's "gobbling it up", and you most likely lose some of the finer tastes along the way. (For reference, as much as I love Ori, I can't really bear to play it more than a couple hours at a time before it becomes "samey" and starts repeating motions and patterns, even with all your "fun per inch" design considerations).
About those design considerations, then: I feel by trying to tie everything to those principles, you're not trying to understand why the game is built how it is, and rather try to analyze it through the lens of your own design principles. While there's certainly worth in doing that to determine if you'll like it as a player, I don't think that's a worthy design critique, and you'd be much better served and likely learn much more trying to understand what they were going for, and how they went to achieve that goal (and critique based on *that*, rather than what you would do/hoped to see yourself). I won't go over the lengthy explanations about the different player experiences on exploration and the ratio of content in the world nor Miyamotot's stated intentions, as I feel they've been sufficiently covered in the thread.
In the end, I'd say to critique any game from a design standpoint, one should consider first and foremost the original intent, and the way/context it's played as a big coloring factor. By trying to force the lens of your own design principles, you're effectively doing the same thing as those who cry that walking simulator aren't games, because they don't obey the same core principles they feel define "games". Does this Zelda fit your "fun per inch" mold? It most certainly does not in the sense you've explained it. Is that important in the context of what they were going for and the feelings they were trying to convey? If anything, I'd argue doing that would have done the opposite, and turned their Hyrule into an artificial theme park, to reuse your comparison. You pretend when playing this game, one pushes the same direction at a time and doing nothing. In my own 20-30h with it so far (already something I find borderline excessive), nothing could have been further from the truth, as I keep deviating from the path for all sorts of reasons - something I likely wouldn't do if I were playing for hours at a time, simply by virtue of how patience works.
I agree with some of your more detailed systemic observations, most notably those about UI (even though I'd argue, for instance, that pausing the game while swapping weapons actually makes the game playable for a great many that wouldn't be able to otherwise - the problem isn't that the game is paused, it's more about the button layout used and the presentation of it - again, we need to critique based on what we can determine the intent to be, not what we as gamers/consumers want).
If we expect a better kind of critique for our own works, we as designers need to try to be better critics ourselves, and an argument of "one design fits all" goes contrary to that (along with ignoring intent, context, etc). I feel most of your arguments stem from you trying to fit your design ethics on a game which fundamentally rejects them. It's not built as you would, and thankfully so, because that means both have reason to exist, and we can look forward to your own take on things - which will not have more or less merit than this one!
EDIT: for reference and just so this post isn't me complaining about complaints, here are some of my own game complaints (let's be generous and call them critiques) so far, though I haven't finished the game yet, so those are subject to change:
-for a game that I feel aims to offer a "freeform" experience where you can go anywhere, anytime, I feel it tries too hard to railroad the player into doing the Zora donjon/beast first, as out of the three I've done, it's the closest to the initial main quests (which you're also strongly encouraged to do as they unlock some "necessary" equipment, such as the camera and introduce quasi-necessary concepts like the Great Fairy and the Korok Seed exchanger - if you skip Kakariko on a new game, you're basically gimping yourself unnecessarily for a long while and I don't see that as a choice where "every direction is equivalent" but rather "you can choose to skip the handrails we put for you at your own risk, enjoy your limited inventory for longer that you're initially meant to"). The Zora questline is also the most developed/structured so far out of Zora/Goron/Rito, whereas others simply build off this existing structure (most notably, the Rito dungeon buildup)
-I also feel the menu use is a bit excessive - I don't see a way around it considering how useful the different armor pieces are, but I'd likely have added "quick swap options" to go back to set custom outfits, since we're meant to swap often, and added another shortcut button to swap menu pages without going over each section's pages (right stick on switch is supposed to do that, but it still goes over every ingredient/meal page, when you might want to swap directly from armor to, say, meals)
-I also echo the arrow shortage feeling, since they're the most versatile and useful tool around - you can easily farm them at the entrance to the Zora domain (another reason why the Zora domain is strongly hinted at first?), but I'd have taken other options to get arrows, the main one being "crafting them at campfires" as that feels the most in theme with the rest and would have given another reason to light campfires (so far, I don't really do that except to melt iceblocks)
-I see what they were going for with the rain, and heavy rainfall can be an interesting obstacle to overcome and force you to rethink your approach, but those random 5s rainfalls that only serve to get you to slip once are a bit much :-D
-I also hate with a passion the gyro puzzles as I feel they're woefully out of place and feel gimmicky and clash with the "many ways to solve every puzzle" ethics of the rest of the game, but that may also be because I suck at them :v