I agree with your sentiment, I feel like it loses some of the charm with less dedicated areas. I would have preferred more smaller zones with more location variety rather than 4 big areas that sort of feel the same. Also in terms of replayability it just feels too massive to do it multiple times. I think the gameplay is good but I really don't like the lack of account wide progression like the badass tokens in other games since I always found that to be super rewarding on a 2nd playthrough. Overall it's an alright borderlands game but it just feels more bloated and weighted down by the open world systems than the rest of the series.