I hung out with a friend of mine today, the only one I have that owns a Wii U. I asked if he has Zelda and he does but he's barely played it and he got it on day one! He's off the Great Plateau and is earning money to buy stuff. He has literally done no shrines aside from the Great Plateau ones. He feels the sheer scope of the game is overwhelming and just doesn't seem that excited about it. I was rather surprised. Everyone at work that has this game is nutso over it. Everyone on any forum I visit is crazy about it. He is literally the only person I've encountered who has played this game that seems rather lukewarm on it.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Whenever you hear people rave about "I spent 50-100 hours on this!", I mean, that's like 100 episodes of TV shows, or 3 re-reads of War and Peace. Daunting as hell.
I've not played an open world game since Spider-Man 2 (discounting the 2 hours in Xenoblade X), and never really used crafting systems before. The prospect of Zelda is both thrilling but also a bit off-putting, if only because it seems like such a massive commitment. Instead I've been playing Sky Force Anniversary, a simple arcade shmup.
Will certainly get Zelda soon, but just saying I think I understand where your friend is coming from. If you look at Zelda as this monolithic entity that must be consumed whole, rather than a whole bunch of bite-sized chunks to dip into at your leisure, it's just a very daunting proposition.
Plus I mean, people who rave about it on forums are kind of self-selecting right. For every 5 hype posts there's surely someone out there who got sucked in by the hype and "doesn't get it" or gave up early. Reckon once the honeymoon phase is over we'll see more critical takes on BotW emerge.