Hey. Game design hobbyist/enthusiast here. Maybe I can offer some insight on the "too many skips" thing.
Breath of the Wild is zelda's take on "emergent gameplay", a concept I went a bit into depth in on my blog review of skyward sword (you can find that
here)
Basically, Breath of the Wild's physics engine is a set of rules that objects follow, and the developers don't necessarily have the time to test every single ruleset in conjunction with every single object. So players will always run into what you're referring to here as a "skip". Sometimes it may seem unintended because of how easy the game makes it, but if you look at Breath of the Wild's design philosophy, there's a pretty clear roadblock: You have to make every shrine a singular puzzle. Any prerequisite to a shrine breaks the open world progression and introduces linearity, which is exactly not what the developers were trying to do.
Essentially, shrines as a bare minimum need to be completeable with objects inside the shrine or with the sheikah slate, so it's likely that developers spent very little time testing alternative solutions. In this exact case, yes, they very likely knew there was a simpler option available to a majority of players, but you have to keep in mind that every shrine could be somebody's first (fifth) shrine. That's literally not something they had the time or resources to do anything about.
Hopefully this clears things up. And it's totally okay if this isn't the kind of puzzle solving you prefer. It's not exactly my cup of tea either, but there are already games for us :p (I'm hoping beyond hope that more come my way).
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As for korok seeds- you can already see that they have diminishing returns (it's upwards of fifty per inventory slot at some point), so it's a good idea to use some korok seeds to expand bow and shield slots. But I think you're right to be favoring weaponry, as that gets used the most. Bows have absurdly high durability as well, but if you take on guardians by reflecting their shots with parries and you suck like me it's a good idea to have a few extra inventory slots for both shields and korok seeds.