Anyone else remember when we used to ban people for lazy dev rhetoric? Yeah....those were the days.
This argument isn't worth having on this forum.
Either you enjoy playing the game with the content it has or you don't.
I'm not sure I get you? I'm not calling individual devs lazy?
It was an opinionated statement that I tend to find a lot of padding
can be lazy game design if it's not handled with care or propped up in some way. That's just my preference. Largely speaking I would take traversing around an average sized town with hand-crafted quests, text and things to do, over a Skyrim like size map where the vast majority of content feels copy/paste. Especially for fantasy based RPGs where I think town/city life and exploration can be killer.
I'm not big on randomly generated content in general, so that is my bias towards less of it. Not that it can never work, it simply often pushes me to feel the content is "lazy". Mainly because
my interaction is lazy. Often mash x to skip NPC generic text about needing to craft clothes, mash x to fast travel, mash x to kill generic enemy, mash x to pickup generic fabric loot from enemy and then fast travel back. NPC then says "I'll now make leather pants, thanks". Woo.
Most gameplay revolves around repetition, but open world game design often comes down to how well can devs disguise it or make it feel less "lazy". Or even eliminate most of the generic content by pursuing a focus in hand-crafted even if that comes at the expense of "Our world is 25,000 miles wide". Or the king of randomly generated, NMS saying "Our world is endless". Yes it can take massive teams and years to craft huge worlds, but as impressed as I can be with the hard work that has gone on to create them, that's not going to influence my perceived truth around how much fun I am having, or how intrigued I am by the quest content/writing.
I'm playing through Spiderman right now and the side-quest marker content is prime copy/paste and pretty generic (Stop one shop break-in or mugging and that's them all - So go to a new area, unlock your tower and do another 5 break-ins), but the card they have up their sleeve is the traversal and "power" you get through being a superhero/Spiderman pretty much disguises the mundane. A lot of people fantasize about being able to fly, and yeah, it's pretty exhilarating getting close to that in Spiderman zipping around and doing "fast travel" in a way that isn't bring up map, click marker, see loading screen.
But that is something that Insomniac could use to their advantage because it is a superhero game. Other open-world RPGs while they might have powerful characters, or things like magic abilities, don't often get to give you traversal like in Spiderman. Water travel in AC has been a long favourite of mine, Black Flag is still my favourite AC game, so Ubisoft does a lot right there. But then again Black Flag was full of similar filler, but like Spiderman, because I'm in love with pirates/water travel, that elevated the experience over some of the mundane (for me). That's the crux of open world games, and to some extent their design, you may reel in many, but alienate others. It's still worth listening to all feedback, especially around any sort of level or progression-gating you try and implement. Boring quests or fetch quest design is one thing to discuss, gating and/or how you progress in your world is another. Both are parts of open-world game design though, and often inter-linked.