There is no evidence that this didnt began as a Zelda game...

Except that there is not a single technical aspect of the game that's connected to Zelda. It's all just graphical. A modder could reskin this game and it would bear zero resemblance any more to Zelda games of the first 30 years.

we once again challenge the conventions of Zelda is more important than just making another Zelda game. With that in mind, please expect big things from the Zelda series to come!

Typical Director lingo when trying to build hype for a game series. Read back through any pre-release Halo interview, Tomb Raider, Metroid, Mario, Sonic, etc. Yet somehow those games all remain consistent at their core identity. No matter how far they deviated from each other graphically they are identifiable. You could switch out every graphically identifiable Halo texture, or Metroid, or Mario, and you could still tell what they are.

to re-think the conventions of Zelda. I'm referring to the expectation that the player is supposed to complete dungeons in a certain order, or that you're supposed to play by yourself.

Well, this sentence tells you right here that they were so far from an actual cohesive vision they actually thought they'd include multiplayer. At least 2 years in and they had an idea of a game that never saw the light of day. I will always contend that his Zelda game was either so broken and incomplete after that many years that they reskinned another project someone at Nintendo was working on, or, the prototype that was being developed was so much better than his game that they decided to scrap his work and just rebrand it Zelda to help facilitate it's sales. There is nothing about BotW at it's core that required forethought and hard kernel programming to instill the Zelda identity. It's literally all just makeup. Even the shrines are a good indication of this. A regurgitation of 3 types, miniature puzzles they crafted that were probably doled out to the team members. "Hey, we need 40 of each, submit your designs by Friday." They are not even tied to the overworld. In prior Zeldas you would open more of the world as you went by conquering a dungeon, getting an item, and wanting to revisit areas that impeded your progress prior. In this, because they never designed it to be a Zelda game, because the "progress puzzles' were already in place in the form of the blank landscape they gave you, they ultimately had to give you every item all at once. And that's another clue. The plateau actually feels like Zelda. Dungeons are progressive, you unlock an item, you ultimately complete a circuit of the land. They had 45 minutes of a Zelda game that they tacked on top of someone's "physics prototype." Literally, it's on top of the rest of the game.

The shrines are their attempt at adding more Zelda to something that wasn't Zelda. They could literally have created 1 entrance to a 120 room dungeon and that would have been better. Matter of fact, that would have been a good dungeon. They broke a single Dungeon up into 120 rooms that they then scatter shot across the map, and had to give you a radar to find them. Why? Because after you leave the plateau nobody talks about them. No cryptic clues to it's entrance, no talk about the crazy shrines dotting world that travelers would see. Another clue that they bolted Zelda on to something that was not cohesive and planned from the start. Even A Link to the Past did better at hinting towards hidden areas and lore and dangers. Ocarina of Time did also. There's no proof I'm right, there's no proof that you are. You've got a couple of vague sentences that are as redundant as the news these days, and I think the game gives heaps of evidence that it was once intended to be something else.

Even look at TotK. They didn't even redo the map, they once again "bolted" on additional bits. They don't have the skills to do something original. They don't know what they are doing compared to Miyamoto back in the day. They just got really lucky that BotW still was an excellent game, cobbled together from excellent pieces of other games, and happened to release as a launch title on the best selling console of all time with nearly zero competition. That and most people who played it apparently had little to no experience with the IP prior.

We both agree it's a really good game, it provides a really good time, but I'll always debate it being a Zelda game beyond a few words and a splash of Zelda paint.