This post feels straight out of another dimension to me
1. I only recall the spinner showing up twice after Arbiter's Grounds: once in the overworld and once in Hyrule Castle. But even if it did show up more than that, it was nothing more than a glorified lock and key mechanism. Basically just thirty seconds of have spinner, grind rail each time. "Multiple" "sections" of the overworld dedicated to spinner "puzzles" is extremely generous phrasing
2. Half hour to an hour dungeons? What? Unless you've played the game multiple times and are intricately familiar with all the dungeon layouts and puzzles like the back of your hand, they are absolutely the longest dungeons in the franchise. They all took me two to three hours. And I'm going to preemptively block off any conversation pertaining to skill, because my completion time was right in line with the HowLongToBeat average
3. The dungeons might all solve linearly, as in you can't sequence break, but they are absolutely not laid out linearly
For the Spinner, off the top of my head it's in Hyrule Castle, used for at least one lock mechanism in City in the Sky (not much, but it is a use technically), and the rails also appear at least once in Temple of Time. In the overworld there's a whole canyon area dedicated to it, and there's another Spinner puzzle built into the area south of Castle Town with all the gardens where Agitha hangs out sometimes. You have to jump between the rails with proper timing to complete these, it's not just a fancy key and it's actually decently hard to use. I'm not saying it shows up a ton, it's obviously an item limited by needing to have architecture designed specifically for it in order for it to do anything, because that's the way they designed it, but it's far from the only Zelda item like that and I don't think they really did an unusually bad job with giving it things to do outside of the dungeon you find it in (and if nothing else it definitely adds up to more uses outside of the dungeon than in it because of how little it's in that dungeon).
The dungeons are definitely longer than average, I didn't compare them to every other game but 20-30 minutes seemed more like the norm elsewhere. I checked the length of some dungeon playthroughs on YouTube to arrive at the 30 minutes to an hour estimate. Looking over all of them again, 30 minutes seems too low, but 40 on the low end and an hour on the high end, with most of them falling in the 45-50 minute range, seems pretty accurate. I feel like people really overestimate the length of Zelda dungeons in general, but I guess it's kind of hard to judge because they could really take any amount of time beyond what is required just to go through them in a physical sense. That's probably why I just look at their baseline length. I still can't see them normally taking
hours unless you get really stuck.
What I meant by linear was that a lot of Twilight Princess dungeons have a really similar structure that is mostly linear in the sense that you just follow a continuous path and don't really have to turn around or figure out where to go next. This is basically why they weren't setting Mark Brown's world on fire. They're among the most linear Zelda dungeons in that sense, a very far cry from something like OoT Forest Temple where you wander around looking for keys (which is not necessarily a bad thing mind, I've always disliked the way that section was designed, but I digress). You arrive into a "main" room shortly after entering, then you go through one wing, come back into the main room, and then do the other wing.
In terms of Metroidvania design, because the linearity means you tend to do one section of the dungeon and then leave it behind completely, a lot of them don't really have many "I need an item here but don't have it yet" moments. I think they always try to have at least
one in this game, so there's that? Zelda dungeons have honestly never been consistently great at taking advantage of this formula though, Link's Awakening came up with it and did it really well (before Super Metroid, even!) but then one game later you have the Shadow Temple where you get the item so fast you might as well have entered the dungeon with it, and Dodongo's Cavern where the first place you need to use bombs is conveniently located past the room where you get bombs. Twilight Princess could be more clever with it than I'm remembering though, a few of them did do a pretty solid job, like Forest Temple and Temple of Time (though calling a completely straight path Metroidvania design feels wrong for other reasons), but then those are two of the ones that diverge the most from the above template for the path you need to take through them. I should also mention that Wind Waker and Twilight Princess both do this thing where they have chests containing Treasure Charts/Heart Pieces which you can optionally backtrack to in earlier parts of the dungeon, often once you get the item. I suppose these could technically provide more of those "here's a thing I can't do yet" moments in certain dungeons, though I think they tend to be kind of hidden, probably because they don't want them acting as red herrings drawing the player away from the real path forward once they do get the item.
