The Shrines were a huge part of why I was so unimpressed with BotW, because they were all so transparently made piecemeal. "Open World" doesn't mean a whole lot when you're expected to complete random identically flavored puzzles every 15 minutes.

I can also picture how Shrines were engineered a fast-food style assembly line: "Nintendo Engineering Team 46-b, you're being assigned Shrines 5-23, complete them in x weeks."

Even barring Shrines, the "Open World" itself was fairly devoid of interesting things.