I dunno if there's anything to this but

I feel like the majority of the hatred of BotW durability was from Optimizer/Competitive crowds? I think calling it "durability" specifically, without a method to repair, is what did that. Part of me thinks that even just rebranding it to something like... "integrity" or something, I don't have a better word.

Personally, I wish it had some loop into some other system (maybe weapon upgrades? I've seen the idea of if it had given you "dust" that was used for upgrades / getting the same eapon over and over it gets more uses, it'd take most of the sting out) but my feelings playing the game were that it was like, oh, ok, weapon broke killing X, now I've got Y, let's just keep going, even 1 enemy => 1 weapon seems fine as long as the flow continues of fresh weapons

It's... weird, right? Like. Elden Ring encouraged exploration via spirit ashes / ashes of war / upgrade stones, primarily. And even then, on some level, you absolutely run out of "reason" to keep up the exploration of ruins and such when you get a build online, unless you just... want to. The rewards stop feeling satisfying.

That's the problem with open world games, entirely. Oblivion/Skyrim tried with leveled loot lists -- we'll keep scaling up the rewards, that way you keep finding reason to do things! But it meant that there just... wasn't, until you were leveled, and even then there wasn't enough variety of Stuff that was meaningful rewards.

Durability systems are weird and finicky and can leave a lot of bad feelings but I dunno, I feel like the entire game would have been Fundamentally Different and... with no other major changes, fundamentally worse?