Finished ME:A and then Zelda recently. I can relate to some of Wombat's sentiments, but overall I would say ME:A 6/10, BOTW 8/10.
Full disclosure is that I hated almost all open world games, only beat Mordor and Saboteur. In both cases I loved the setting, and a couple unique touches (nemesis system, and black-white color scheme).
The story of BOTW is pretty boring, with no twists or turns. Even worse, due to the openness of the world, the 4 beasts are more or less repeats of similar story beats. One at least has an interesting premise of Link having been there in the past, the rest are very blah.
The 4 beasts and final boss fights aren't all that interesting mechanic-wise either. They do require enough health and arrows. But how is a new player supposed to know how much health they need? I definitely feel like the best way to start is just wandering randomly until at least 20 or so shrines are done, upgrade stamina 2-3 times, and put the rest in health. Equipment breakage is always annoying and especially so during these fights.
In terms of being forced to travel back to town part, at least fast travel is easy in this game, so players never get stuck. The question of why can't Link cook anywhere (maybe require certain items so he can start a fire and put a pot on?) or at least somewhere in the dungeon though, is a fair complaint in my view.
Towers are at least a step up from the Ubisoft icon vomit formula, but wombat is correct in saying that seeing where things might be do not give any sense of how difficult the traversal (environments in the game are basically puzzles, but without enough upgrades or knowing where to get stuff they are frustrating) or encounters actually will be.
Loot in the game is disappointing. Some equipment have cool extra effects, but chests or monster drops rarely excite me. In any case, they'll break soon anyway. Equipment slots limitations are also annoying. Due to these factors, I never stressed out about leaving unopened chests.
I feel like new players need some extra info to enjoy the starting parts, and getting to know some of the cooler things BOTW allows that other games don't also elevates appreciation of the game. To be fair, I would have have missed most of them on my own as well. Like explosions cook food, bombs be used to fish, standing on a bridge gets NPCs to try to talk you down, etc. Perhaps reading a bit would help Wombat to like the game more.
Overall the world in BOTW is already more interesting than Skyrim or ME:A. The lenient travel points are also one step above ME:A (I hate those multi-part fetch quests). Ease of movement is great, as Link can climb, glide, and handle almost any terrain; whereas the driving in ME:A is horrendous (you also had to press a button to switch driving mode to get up hills...why...). I would rate BOTW as one of the better open world games, but the limitations of the open world does drag down some parts that may have been awesome in past Zelda games. Hence the disappointment Wombat feels expecting a conventional Zelda game. ME:A on the other hand, should not have been open world at all.