Varying opinions on Sol Valley aside, I do think that one unambiguous win about Prime 4 was Vi-0-La, and I think that could be carried forward.
I would love to see them try a Prime 1/2 styled world, but with the inclusion of vehicle sections. Flare Pool felt like a really promising first stab at that sort of design; just needs to be taken further. I don't think the new and the old need to be inherently mutually-exclusive.
To elaborate on this, imagine something sorta like, Mario Kart World or a Forza Horizon game, where you have an open world with a bunch of interconnected highways and stuff, right?
Take that basic notion, scaled appropriately, but cut out the space between the roads, split the map into large portions divided by an equivalent of the Vi-0-La tunnels, and then further chop each chunk of the map into individual Rooms; maybe it's a really mountainous planet overall with a bunch of smaller valleys or basins or canyons, depending on the biome. Then the spaces between the different roads, fill that back in with traditional on-foot sections in buildings or more narrow/rugged natural terrain that a vehicle can't go into. And of course apply the usual upgrade-based Metroidvania progression to it all, whether it be the vehicle areas or the on-foot portions.
Maaaybe a more open hub-area acting as a nexus for a few different highways for some more free-roaming action, but still nowhere near as like, excessively vast as Sol Valley.
Then, yanno, it would resemble Prime 1 in structure, but could make the backtracking more fun and less tedious because the currently-opened roadways would function as a loose "fast travel" without completely trivializing exploration or disrupting immersion with a hard jump from Point A to Point B. (Basically acting like Magmoor in function, but the first portion of Flare Pool in form.) It would also make opening new roadways a new kind of reward for forward progression, as the network of highways slowly start to link up to each other more.
And with Retro's technical prowess and the Switch 2 hardware, and good use of verticality, a lot of it could still be more aesthetically open-air and utilizing visible landmarks in other portions of the map like with Fury Green's tree and Volt Forge's towers, without that impeding on the actual design and traversal still being sufficiently mazelike/complex/engaging.
I think that's the best way for a Prime 5 to try to go about building on Prime 4's strengths while improving its flaws, at least design-wise. It may not work or be amazing in practice, but I'd love to see the attempt be made at least.
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