But your “better” has zero to do with quality.
that is strictly a matter of how you measure quality. At no point did I say that the measure used by anyone here is objective, quite the contrary
It’s better for you because you prefer open ended adventures. Which is perfectly cool. No problem at all.
Or maybe I just like gothic horror better than pseudo-space travel, fairytales or plane-hopping, regardless of whether it is a sandbox or not. CoS and SKT are both sandboxy, yet CoS is considered one of the best adventures while SKT is near the bottom, so there are plenty of criteria that people consider.
Yet going by objective criteria like readability of the font (cannot rate how much you like the font or whether it fits the theme, that is subjective), number of typos, full color print, some art pieces (cannot rate the art, that is subjective, so just its existence), glue binding, ... they come out on par. What good is rating something by criteria that do not reflect what people like better? How do you explain the difference in rating and do you consider it relevant at all?
If you do not want to call this quality, fine, then call it something else. Whatever you want to call it, that is what is being discussed here, what people like and why, since that is all that matters given that the technical / production quality has been pretty consistent and largely does not matter (unless it is really good or really poor). Quality encompasses more than the production side of things.
But once you invoke “quality” now you are claiming one is objectively superior.
Only if you assume that quality is objective. I see no reason why that would be the case. There are some objective criteria, but those are by no means all there are.