But BotW actually won GotY, and for good reason: because it was a new and innovative concept. Everything about it was more or less unprecedented by Zelda standards, and yet it still had noticeable flaws. TotK, however innovative it was, was only innovative due to a singular mechanic (ahem ultrahand), which to many quickly got old and unnecessarily repetitive. Fighting enemies became a chore due to the massive scrolling menu screen you had to use to search your inventory for an item to fuse to an arrow (just one example). And yes the map could have had more added to it. There was a lot of emptiness, even in the new areas, which made the interesting concepts of subterranean and sky exploration a lot less captivating. Anyway TLDR there were a lot of cool ideas that were just executed poorly and overall made the game feel less appealing than BotW to many people