Wait, I'm confused. Oerworlds with largely empty spaces, meaning literally no content for large stretches of areas, have more to do and more secrets to find than a dense and layered overworld with something to do around every corner? That... literally makes no sense. Less content automatically means less to do.
The questions is not about quantity, but about density. Before I state my argument, I must say that I'm talking about what would be a very good vast overworld, and that TP is not perfect; I'm not using it as an example.
Now, my argument is that a really vast overworld, like Skyrim's one, for example, has much more content than SS's overworld (for example). I haven't played Skyrim much, but I'm certain of that. Now I'm not telling Nintendo to spend 5 years making a gigantic overworld that looks good, and has stuff to do, and then either have us wait 10 years for the whole game or rush all the other areas and aspects of the game, but on even on a smaller scale, it would still work. Imagine an overworld 3x bigger than TP's, with about the same density of content - it would have
at least as much stuff to do as SS's overworld, and probably more.
The difference is in
how you find all the secrets; in a tight overworld, it's mostly a navigational challenge, while in a vast one, it's more like riding on Epona across vast fields, looking out for caves and secrets as you go. Personally, I much prefer the latter. As someone else said, "if there are secret and stuff around every corner, it's not adventuring anymore - it's walking along a corridor past corners. You should search secrets out, find hidden grottos and treasure chest - basically, you should go on an adventure." I think I heavily rephrased it, but it's the idea that's important.
All that said, there should still be navigational areas. TP attempted to do this with places like DM - which ended up being just a walk up a mountain, with a bit of help from catapulting Gorons - and the end of Gerudo Desert, with the bulblin village. However, there should definitely be more of those - where they make sense, that is. In a way, there should be a "field" overworld, where you explore for sidequests and which you can skip by warping if you don't like travel, and a "quest" overworld, where you would go for the main story, which would be like SS's overworld. In fact, if SS has a central vast Hyrule Field, it would be very close to a near-perfect (in my opinion) overworld.
In all reality, if there's any game to point to when making this kind of comparison to TWW and TP's overworlds, it's ALttP. It provides an immense sense of adventure without being sparse by any stretch of the imagination, and it really seems like a lot of people tend to overlook that here at ZD.
I never use Alttp as an example because I never played it. I suppose a lot of newer gamers here haven't either, as it's not very easy to get nowadays.