Is Fina smiling when she sees the kids running around Pirate Isle. We don't find out until much later in the game that this is the first time Fina has seen a child since she and Ramirez were children, themselves.
I played the original Wind Waker when I was a kid and I don't remember getting stuck here at all, but when I replayed the HD version recently, I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to go next and felt really dumb for having to google it.
The crazy part, to me, is that this is in the very same room with the EXTREMELY obvious torch/boomerang switch puzzle that practically rubs the solution in your face. Really threw me off, because I wasn't expecting to have to do something so obtuse immediately after being completely spoonfed.
The first movie was juggling too many arcs and setups that had little or no payoff because it felt like it was just running through a to-do list before hitting the credits. The second movie wasn't really juggling anything besides dropping recognizable Mario characters and concepts into action setpieces as they worked toward a singular goal. To that end, I get why Miyamoto didn't understand the second film getting the same criticism as the first. It wasn't that they fixed the pacing—they adjusted the content to match the pacing. The fact that the movie jumped from scene to scene without giving you a chance to breathe was legitimately an asset this time around instead of a shortcoming. There isn't some universal standard of "good pacing", yet that's how a lot of people seem to quantify it.
When it comes down to it, I simply don't think that "the movie just put Mario stuff in a blender and dumped it on the screen" is a valid criticism. That's just the kind of movie it was, and every concept was utilized fairly well within the film's own context. As someone who has been a diehard Mario fan since the 80s, I enjoyed it very much.
To be fair, I've found the same thing to be true about the 1993 Mario movie, which has been eternally maligned for not looking/sounding enough like the games. But again, I don't think that makes it a bad movie. Ironically, I think Mario Galaxy is exactly the movie people wanted 33 years ago, but obviously expectations have shifted.