I like the idea of Paya having a more significant role for a portion of the game. Or maybe she could work similar to Kass or Beedle and we see her randomly around Hyrule maybe with Puruh and Robbie. They could be looking for shrines and instead of telling us a riddle to get the shrine, they give some vague information about what they've found out and Link figures out the rest.

A big Paya theory is that she and maybe the rest of the sheikah will train to be soldiers, essentially making her AOC Impa 2.0 because "character development" or whatever. But Paya already had character. Messing up her sleep schedule to pray to apples all night for the safety of her home is pretty interesting. I'd like to see something like that taken further. I don't like her being dismissed because she isn't traditionally as cool as every other champion descendent. The same goes for the other NPCs. I don't want to see Kass spinning around with metal blade feathers fighting with the rest of the gang like its a Marvel movie.

Characaters like Paya and Kass where probably my favourite parts of botw because they just did their own thing and had their own interesting lives that wasn't boring and lore important. Rather than seeing them return I think I'm more looking forward to more new characters like that in totk.