Yeah Ice Missiles and Grapple Beam are barely used in platforming and it's a bit odd. Once you get Flash Shift using Grapple for movement is almost useless except for a few EMMI sections with water.
Then even more items are less useful when you take into account Speedrun tricks, but that can't really be helped. Unless they patched the exploits, but that would make speedrunning a lot less interesting.
Speaking of which I've played through the game twice again. Once on hard doing a practice Speedrun that took 4:05, so I just barely missed the art unlock for that. Then I did another Speedrun on Normal of 2:56. Now I just have to retry it on hard and I'll have all the game's achievement art.
I know some of you guys (not the person I quoted) are a little down on Dread and Zero Mission, but damn they are fun to sequence break and Speedrun. I too was a bit disappointed with Dread (specifically how it reused a lot of mini bosses and other assets, which I explained in an earlier post), but since Zero Mission there hasn't been a Metroid with this many intended sequence breaks and ways to approach the game.
It does seem pretty linear first play through because the game uses a lot of indirect way finding, but you can really open it up if you know how. Gonna probably play it two more times; gotta get my damn money's worth since I got a Switch just for it.