Grinding isn't only restricted to the blue ring, there's the bow and arrow too.

For someone who likes to have their quest resemble the original Zelda please bear in mind that the original Zelda didn't have kaizo difficulty in either the first or second quest. So if you make that glaring difference then why not make other changes? There are also custom enemies in the quest that aren't in the original Zelda. So if you are willing to make custom enemies then why not change other aspects of design?

You can't get into Death Mountain without the 8 pieces of the triforce. If you have the 8 pieces of the triforce, then presumably you would have beaten 8 bosses and got 8 more heart containers. And yeah, the demo quest was good right up to the point where you had to burn the statue which didn't shoot fireballs.

Finally, if you did restrict Zelda 3's secrets to those three items then you haven't communicated that anywhere to the player. How does the player know that you won't have a burning statue somewhere?

Zoria - I've played plenty of old Nintendo games, Zelda is the only game I know of that uses secrets to hide things essential to game completion without any hint of where it is. Care to name others?