Eh history revisionists tried to say Battletoads was bad too. Startropics is pretty great, but it's not amazing. The RPG elements are incredibly linear, but the action gameplay, while a little funky, is fun. The theme is great.
It's really hard to imagine a universe were Startropics replaces Zelda. Like maybe it's a world where tiki culture took the world by storm and Lord of the Rings was based on Polynesian lore and such... I dunno. Heck, maybe Polynesia took their abundant resources in prehistory and used that power to expand wildly and rule the world in that universe.