I am personally not against the choice to use only the wiimote instead of the nunchuk.
I'm against the decision to not use the IR at all for "re-centering" the cursor automatically by pointing to the TV.
My target were often out of range, moving in a direction while I pointed to the TV.
If "playing quietly and calmly" solved it, then tell me you never needed to recenter your cursor (but I won't trust you).
Nintendo added that feature because they realized it was a necessity, because their movement detection is not working correctly.
My sword is often reversed, pointing upward while I'm pointing the wiimote to the TV, When swimming I encountered twice the problem where Link was swimming to the left (in circle) if I kept the wiimote pointing horizontally to the TV. To swim straight I required to turn the wiimote to the right, but then I couldn't swim to the right :/
I only could solve it by doing a real recalibration in the options (not a re-centering as there's no target).
So, personally I had difficulty with the controls, but I don't blame Zelda, I blame the technology which is not good enough to detect the real space position and user's movements accurately.
I'm sure the auto-centering by pointing to IR would have solved a lot of these problem, but maybe it wasn't working fine together so they removed it.
edit:
OH, and a real flaw in the game functionality regarding this motion+ position:
I really don't understand why nintendo didn't realized that when you pick an item/weapon, you are obviously no more pointing at the center of the screen, then why do they use your current position as the center?
They should have remembered the distance your cursor position is located from the center of the screen so the user could move his wiimote back to really be in the center after selecting an item.
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