01011001 hates Megaman Zero. This is a fact i wish i never knew from you.
Level design was open and fun with many secrets to explore, the Cyber Elf system gives the game great replay value and encourages exploration.
Camera is GBA issue, not a problem with the game.
the camera made exploring a chore, you basically can only see 2m left and right from you, and barely anything above you... that's a horrible setup for a game with a semi-open map.
and you can't just decouple the quality of the game from one of the main parts of it... the part that lets you actually look at the game world
the GBA had this issue a lot as well, as developers tried to make more ambitious games, and then often also tried to copy the graphics detail of SNES games.
Castlevania did it better, as Konami actually made the graphics less detailed and shrunk everything down, in order to accommodate the low res display.
the camera ruined the game for me. if they made a Remake with the camera scale of ZX you might have a point, but just like a narrow field of view would ruin a fast pased FPS, a narrow FOV can absolutely ruin a Mega Man game with the speed and movement similar to the MMX series, which is what happened in Zero IMO