Quality, not quantity please.
Certain developers' obsession with "content" is how we ended up with games as ghastly long as Dragon Warrior VII or Persona 5 Royal.
In some cases it's almost a sham (XY shoveled in a whole lot of Pokemon species, but had little postgame to render them actively useful)
I don't get your point - the Sevii Islands were good additional content, for FRLG; they weren't all that long, nor were they all that obtrusive. It was nice to visit places that weren't part of mainland Kanto.
As for Persona 5 Royal...really? What are you talking about? "Ghastly long"? Length doesn't always mean it's going to be a bad game - just look at Xenoblade, Dragon Quest XI...or Persona, for that matter, all of which are great games with fun gameplay.
Sure, Persona 5 Royal may be lengthy, but it's definitely a really fun game; I've played through it multiple times as it's just
that good. They had that length to tell a story, to flesh out characters, and provide a good difficulty curve; almost none of that game could be considered "filler" or unnecessary.
If you want a game that IS long for the wrong reasons - look at Super Mario Galaxy 2. Totally did NOT need all those useless Green Stars throughout
every single level - that's just padding for the sake of padding. I'd agree with "ghastly long" for that.
Or BotW/TotK, with how pointless the open-world ended up being - large for the sake of being large, with almost no dev-placed map markers to highlight the location of actual meaningful content (Ocarina of Time's Hyrule Field is also large, for an N64 location, but it's more of a hub area that connects everything else together - and really doesn't take all that long to traverse).
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