Man your touchy. But to answer your question, those fighting games are fine as far as I'm concerned.
As wonderful as SS is, it does lack in the epic scope of things, and to be honest, creativity as well. The world is always coming to an end, and it never seems like anyone notices outside of MM. I liked that TP had a "big" town with lots of NPC's everywhere, even if you couldn't talk to half of them. But there is always like one major town, and 5 people living in every other town. I would love if the environments got a little more whimsical and creative. They are cool, but a little too bland and realistic half the time. Even Mario's realistic landscapes in Galaxy look beyond epic. The Zelda guys make locations too realistic despite the art style.
When I play Metroid Prime 1 and 2 I feel like there other things going on in the back ground despite not seeing it. Samus's actions have weight and to me the space pirates are really reacting to that. In Metroid Prime 3 Samus is back at the federation and I think "yeah, everyone is aware of all the amazing things she did. There is a real world out there." With Zelda I havn't got that feeling since MM and WW.
Retro would do wonders for Zelda, considering how they did Metroid. They would make it feel like Zelda and then add new and amazing things that just don't happen often with the current developers.
I mean I love flying! But why can't I fly over landscape and use my bird to interact with the world more? Special clouds the birds won't fly through is just BS to keep the game from being more fun. Retro would have done it.
Yeesh. Someone didn't like Skyward Sword.
I agree that Zelda does need a little more of a role-play element to it, however, I think Skyward Sword took steps in that direction. Helping out townsfolk in the VERY well-designed Skyloft- but yeah, the game does need more than just one town. However, I think you're putting a lot of faith in Retro, especially when the Prime series revolved around obtaining powerups and not really reacting with other characters much at all. The story of Prime was okay, though a little all-over the place, and the environments were extremely creative, but in no way whimsical. I mean, the themed locales in DKCR were okay, but they didn't do much for me.
I think that Zelda simply needs to become bigger in scope- the locales are already extremely well-designed, with Skyward Sword pretty much exemplifying how masterfully the Zelda team is at utilizing the space available- but if they had more, and perhaps had environs that were like those in Skyward Sword but had more branching paths into other regions (or if the locales had more of a connection instead of access by sky), the game would be even better.
Something I've talked about with quite a few people is that Skyward Sword is not the end-all Zelda formula and things are going to change. However, the environment design in Skyward Sword was top-notch and I think that any improvements to it would only be a good thing for the franchise.
Moreover, I'm going to emphasize how terrible I think first-person sword-wielding games are. With all the innovation that Nintendo did with motion controls in the third-person format, I would like it to stay that way. Mechanics like swimming, gravity flips, and enemies coming from behind are just disorienting and awkward in first person, IMO.