Again the elitist idea that fast travel is for "new age" "kids" "not real gamers" is flawed, as fast travel has been in games since the 80s and 90s. This sense of "us" vs "them" needs to go away.
You are not a better/more knowledgeable gamer because your games took longer to play.
Complexity from obscurity was mostly how older games played due to bad flow and poor feedback mechanisms. Additionally the advent of readily available information on the internet and "crowd sourced" wiki faqs to explore mechanics and game logic has helped better inform gamers today. Just because we were confused and clueless does not mean our games of old were more complex...they were actually really simple but often tedious for the sake of lengthening content. Data limits made the "actual" game very short, but random encounters and travel restrictions help lengthen a play time.
These are often in place so that there is something to do in a game that has very little content because it was on a couple of floppy disks or maybe a CD ROM. The idea has carried over to inhibit the player in tedium instead of actual content to play to this day. Sometimes that tedium is engaging and "fun"...other times it is not and just exactly that, tedious.
Today, however, we have drastically more space on a hard drive to make these huge games with hours of dialog, plot branches, 3d rendered/textured models, fully immersive worlds, online interaction hooks, full scale musical scores....or just a pixel art game but with more bells and whistles that an old cartridge or floppy disk game couldn't handle.
So again, we have "more content" so we need "less filler", is generally the idea that we as gamers should be asking for in games today.
I acknowledge that sometimes people like filler though...so to each their own.
