There are some quality of life things they could, and should, add to make the overall experience less painful. Not that it's bad by any means, it could just be better. The reason I'm ranking it so high is because I have yet to succumb to the grind.

There is no late game content. The closest we get is spiral abyss and it's just designed to funnel you into the grindy parts of the game at this point. The devs are releasing updates that are slowly making certain things easier but a lot of new players will be blindsided by certain things that only become a problem once it's too late to fix them without sinking tons of time into the game.

One of the first characters I ever pulled was a character from a region that was locked behind a level gate and a questline. I could not level him until I was about 40 hours in. This problem is really only felt by characters from a specific region at the moment but it does still mean that a lot of characters have materials that are locked behind quests and story. The game is far from a botw clone, it's a gorgeous game that clearly has a lot of time and effort sunk into it by a passionate dev team. There are just some glaring issues that need to be addressed before I can give this game a better score.