I don't add much time for first playthroughs because the puzzles really aren't that hard. And after all...I only have my first playthrough once. The other 97 and counting are for life.
The Water Temple is....45 minutes. If under an hour extends to 59 minutes in this case, then I'd say that isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination, but I was 6 at the time, so who can say for sure?
Speaking of the Water Temple...I find it funny that Nintendo apologized over it. I mean between MM's poor save system, tWW's sailing and GBA advertisement, and TP/SS's game breaking glitches...Nintendo decided to apologize over OoT's Water Temple because they challenged us. I recall reading several interviews too where the Zelda team would talk about their experiences where Miyamoto would get them to dumb down AI a bit if it was too hard or weaken the monsters (I'm looking at you TP) so they wouldn't deal as much damage.
If Nintendo--or at least Zelda--was meant to be hardcore, I don't think Nintendo would be going out of their way to make sure we aren't challenged...let alone apologize to us for being challenging.
Miyamoto is also the guy who thinks no one wants starfox u because starfox games in recent years haven't sold well, when he's too stupid to sit back and look at why. Well obviously its because there hasn't been a proper StarFox game since the n64. Assault for the gamecube kinda counts but there was over half the game running on foot where it felt like you were still trying to fly so it was just all ackward, that few parts where you were actually flying were good. Its not the IP, is the quality of games released under that IP, and the fact their playstyles were completely different.
It'd be like them stopping all normal Mario games, and only selling Mario Tennis, and when sales no longer match what they used to be for Mario, and assuming the IP is bad now instead of looking at the games released being so different from what made the games good to begin with.
But that guy has lost his edge he once had. Don't get me wrong i'm not dis respecting him, but his edge is gone.
TP sucks, and not just because it was easy (certaintly didn't help its case) but you couldn't just go explore, you were so forced to do everything they wanted when they wanted, and even how they wanted.
Zelda is about exploration, TP wasn't.
TWW despite being easy, had the fact you could explore, it had that charm to it, it rewarded you for being curious. It didn't decide ok you gota find light bugs now before you can enter that area. TP felt like it punished you for exploring, or straight up didn't allow you to explore at the given time.
Perfect example of what zelda should aim to be more like: Skyrim. Yes skyrim. Every one loved skyrim, it sold an ungodly amount of copies. It was the emobidiment of what Zelda was first envisioned to be. Exploration, freedom, cool fights with dragons, and save the world story line.
Skyrim is so akin to the first Zelda, after you get out of the cave from Helgen, you're free to go any where you want, sure you could go just down the road to the first town which is the obvious place to go, or not.
Zelda 1, bam middle of field, go where you want.
See difficulty is apparently a hard thing for some game designers to understand. The game needs to be accessible to any one, and so they simple resort to holding the players hand. But so many games also do difficulty right, yes the game is accessible and easy to understand, but that doesn't mean it has to be stupid easy either, take the Donkey Kong Country games for example; even your mom can pick it up understand it, and enjoy playing it, but a little bit into the game it starts throwing crazy stuff at you with barrel blasting that you have to perfectly time, mine carts levels, and all sorts of fun things. It eases the players into the difficulty.
What zelda has over the elderscrolls games, is the hand crafted feel to it for so many of the locales. It had handcrafted unique dungeons with puzzles and stuff. skyrim had some very very basic puzzles in dungeons, and all the dungeons were mostly copy pasted cave parts, or dwemer ruins parts. (It still worked with in the theme of the game, after all you were Nordic ruins, they should look similar)
But in my honest opinion if they want to make the greatest bestest zelda game ever, they need to examine games like Skyrim. And bring in that type of open world exploration, but keep the hand crafted feel to it. Both allow us and give us a reason to want to go look around. Make a Hyrule as big as that, fill it with several dozen extra optional dungeons, I'd love to crawl through caves for an hour fighting zombies to find a piece of heart at the end, several cities even if they are just a few buildings and you're calling them a town.
And dont' give me BS but Zelda isn't a W-RPG, though in reality its not very far off if you examine the core of the game. Western RPGS are about exploration and expression of self, and empowerment, Zelda is about exploration and empowerment. Its not a huge leap to make and would simply bring in a huge audience to want to buy that game even people who aren't currently into Zelda, if they see that kind of awesome attached to such a well known name, they might very well give it a 2nd look.