No offense intended, but the whole "legend" idea went out the window once they started making an actual chronology. If Skyward Sword is an actual real event in the history of any given games or timelines, than it is all but confirmed that Hylia, Demise, and The Golden Goddesses do actually physically exist and they aren't myths within the Zelda world. This is further backed up by games like Twilight Princess having us talk to actual spirits who were ordered to do things by the Goddesses or any game which features the Triforce.
I don't mean the events of the series being legends, I mean the backstories for the various games, told within the games being legends. The golden goddesses like you said, we've never physically seen proof in the games of their existence, they're basically a creation myth told by the people of Hyrule. It feels more real and down to earth to consider those stories they tell in the games to be creation myths, complete with all the mystery and contradictions of real creation myths, rather than actual hard facts about the world.
Or in Wind Waker, how they tell the story of "the gods" flooding the world. What gods? The aesthetic of the tower of the gods looks a lot like Sheikah tech, so it's more likely that the sheikah flooded the world, and since they pulled such a massive feat they came off as "gods" to everyone else. Or, since they like to operate behind the scenes, they probably even spread the story that "the gods" did it, to hide the fact that they were the ones pulling the strings. That's the type of "legend" story fudging I'm talking about.
Like, we know Hylia was a person, but the idea that she became a goddess who can then transcend time to show up and effect events later in the timeline doesn't really work great for me. She can be a spirit, sure, but I like the idea of her ascending to legend status within the stories told by the Hylians themselves only, and not actually ascending to become a goddess for
reasons.
I don't think this was about confirming the existence of gods in the world of Zelda. It's more about keeping them as enigmatic/mysterious figures who caused X major event in the long past. But having them directly present in a game as characters with a fleshed out personality, talking to them and fighting side to side with them, it would basically bring them down to the level of regular humans/hylians like Link. That would kill their image as gods, simply to become some powerful character/sidekick. It's partially because we never had much information regarding gods and such in Zelda that we can speculate that like this about the lore and have fun with it.
It's partly that, yeah. I'm sure they'll keep these powerful background characters in the lore and all, but I don't think the concept of omnipotent "gods" works great in the Zelda universe. More like, powerful entities that can sometimes do stuff, mostly in the backstory, but generally are relegated to being worshipped by the actual characters and not really shown in the games.
