80 hours in. By this time I have finished Xenoblade Chronicles, but right now I don't want XCX to finish. I still have three chapters to go and I haven't even fully explored Cauldros. I just want to walk around, help people, kill things, and hope it goes on forever.
So, my two cents 80 hours in: I really disagree with people saying the huge world is pointless and empty. The huge empty world IS the point. It's not big for the sake of big, but it needs to be big enough so that it feels we're exploring a planet. While basecamps are unfortunately useless (seriously why can't we even fast travel there?), meeting a basecamp in the dangerous wilderness was a relief--heck even meeting a random player BLADE was a relief.
Some people complained the seemingly trollish monster placements: random camouflaging Tyrant 20 level higher on a linear mandatory quest, monsters 3 times your level joining a random battle, etc. But that's it--Mira is dangerous. We're so used to open world RPGs soft-gating their world by placing monsters appropriate to player level, but that's rarely the case here. They will mob you if you're not careful, and they will join your harmless battle if you don't pay attention to your surrounding.
To compensate, we're given an unlimited run with insane speed and jump height/distance, and a very generous ground collision detection. Hostiles 20 levels above you in the way? Scale the tiny ledges on a wall if you can. Outrun them if you have to, even if it means having your party members dying. And if you fail, even dying have very little punishment.
Some missions will feel weird--defeat a level 19 enemy in a base surrounded by level 40+ enemies, for instance--but they all are surprisingly doable by the time you unlocked the mission.
I'm one of the people who prefer this kind of story to Xenoblade, too (not saying Xenoblade is bad). Doing random jobs helping people on Mira feels more natural than on Xenoblade, because it is structured that way. Xenoblade's linear story and sense of urgency feels weird to me--like Shulk is in the enemy base, war has started, yet he returned to Colony 9 to collect beetles or some shit. Not everyone feels like this obviously but it's one of the thing that made me feel more home-y in XCX.
Which is weird because I thought I would prefer the original Xenoblade because it has "more story". I am very wrong about that.
tl;dr: Mira feels like a theme park with lots of attractions and it's up to us to decide whether we're ready to brave them or not. Game has flaws but I can easily say it's my personal GOTY.