With Metroid Prime 4 being my first Metroid game, I gotta ask, does every game in the series have similar unintuitive design decisions?

Most things in this game seem like they exist only to pad for time, with the game being only 8 hours long I can see why. Such as at the start Mackenzie says to go explore any area you want but then you go to any area other than the intended one and you can’t do anything, wasting your time by going there and accomplishing literally nothing instead of just saying go to the volcano. Or with some of the boss fights, right after you get a new power you expect to use it for the boss fights but then you end up using an older one, making it confusing and clunky. And why the fuck is the final boss 20 minutes long? The first phase is so boring, there was absolutely no reason for it to take that long.

TLDR: many of the decisions made around the design in this game are not thought out and very unintuitive, I’m sure if I played the games before this I would know what to look for. I ended up having to look up what to do like 7 times, just to progress not to do like any bonus things. Also why is it 100 dollars for an 8 hour game? That’s a complete scam.