It’s hard to say where the balance lies for every game, so I can’t say for sure what’s best for Pikmin without having played but more options never hurt anyone.

But as far as Zelda goes, I have heard all the arguments and maybe they might fit perfectly with a chunk of that audience, but that’s definitely not the experience that I had. So much so I bounced off of BotW twice until I finally started to enjoy it.

You lose out on moments where you actually enjoy finding a 90-attack weapon, because you’d find it and go “Meh…I already have a 100-damage weapon.” And because the game isn’t promoting constant power progression, it doesn’t have a ton of different things to reward you with for quests and exploration if you’re never losing things from your inventory - so you’d pretty quickly be ending quests with “Man I don’t even want this”.

But it’s because that I had a 100 attack weapon that the 90 one feels like routine upkeep rather than a reward, and anything less might as well be a stick. A lot of quests in those games gave me that “Man I don’t even want this” feeling. Every chest with middling weapons. Every quest that rewards me with food or a pittance of rupees. If not for shrines and their permanent upgrades, I wouldn’t feel that motivated to explore. The cycle of finding expendable things to spend on more expendable things wears me out.