Zelda's issue is her character design. She was designed as half of a character, the power half. She can KO very early but relies on sweetspots. She's tall, light, floaty, and slow. Her mobility is pretty limited, along with her lagginess, making it very hard to land the sweetspots she needs. She has a great punish game if you can read your opponent well, or they really just screw up, but you aren't going to be able to punish much of anything, especially against the extremely safe top tiers.
Her long distance game is limited by a terrible projectile (Din's), and her mid range game revolves around the Phantom, which is only really useful when you use a wavebounce or B reverse. It does help a lot in giving closure though since it creates space between you and your opponent but could still use some help in the buffing department. At close range she relies heavily on the correct spacing to sweetspot for a kill, and her Jab is only a tad too slow to be really useful. Dtilt is her best option close up but there's only so much you can do with it. Utilt can start combos, and Ftilt can KO near the ledge at high percents.
Her Dsmash is very quick, but has limited range and power. Her Fsmash is great at catching opponents and the final hit has a nice disjoint. Her Usmash has terrible range except for the final, disjointed hit, but it at least has good power.
Fair and Bair need to be sweetspotted and are unsafe in any circumstance unless you connect the sweetspot. On shield, a sweetspotted Fair/Bair is mostly safe, but not entirely. It's good for an approach (for her) and does a lot of shield damage, but you'd need a lot of practice to really incorporate its uses well. Dair is a very good spike and easy to land, very safe, except on shield. Nair is a good combo move at lower mid percents, or a good move to be comboed into. It's lasting hitbox allows it to catch opponents easily, and drag them with her. Her Uair is powerful but hard to land because it's just a floating disjoint that's not attached to Zelda at all. Requires precision and a read to pull off because of this.
Nayru's Love can be used in many different situations, but is a bit too slow to be as useful as it should be. It's a great alternative to Dsmash, can be used when landing, shuts out grabs, alters aerial momentum, and reflects, it's just the frame data on it that makes it not as useful as it should be. At least it does decent damage. The perfect "get off me" tool. Farore's wind can be used to greatly improve Zelda's mobility but requires a ton of practice on many different stages to perfect the angles and positioning for such feats, otherwise you'll be punished for the gross end lag.
Her grab game is mediocre. Fthrow, Uthrow, and Bthrow all do decent knockback and damage, but none of them will KO unless you're as close as possible to the blast line. Her grab itself is also very slow, but to make up for this, has good reach. Her Dthrow is only okay compared to most the other Dthrows in the game, not always allowing a followup, relying on reads. Anyone can DI out of a followup by directing their input behind Zelda.
When you put all of this together, you just have a character that is limited by her design's execution. Several moves are too laggy to be able to compensate for her being so slow and relying on precision. She requires much dedication to see good results. It's the issue that her moves don't always give enough reward for how risky they can be. She does at least have a few safe moves and good pokes, and her moves all work properly. Many matchups only feel like slight disadvantage, but no matchup really feels like you're guaranteed going to win like some others. Her matchups feel unfavorable but not dramatically. If you're able to be on point with everything, you just might win, but if you're missing all your combos and sweetspots and punishes, then you'll be in for a bumpy road.
She has potential to be a good character, the developers just really need to buff her neutral and her General lagginess so that she can compensate and not always be at a disadvantage. The argument that she's great in FFA's is also not a very good one either as she still requires proper spacing for kills even in casual play (unless someone just walks into your Smash attack or you hit them with Farore's when they're not looking).
Just me rambling.
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