The quirky, weird Zeldas that ignore the main plotline tend to be the best ones. And that's why Spirit Tracks was better than Twilight Princess.
Link's Awakening also gets points for featuring the first appearance of the douchebag owl from Ocarina. What's your problem, owl? Do you really think I need you to swoop down and tell me to go to Death Mountain when I'm like two feet away from it? Go die of owl cancer.
Twilight Princess had it's moments of eccentricity (cannon clown, Quirky Hyrule Resistence Squad, Midna's general presence as the anti-Navi). It excelled at what it set out to do, despite the obvious aesthetic failures inherent to the game. I found the ending to be deeply nightmarish.
I liked the shop toucan with the afro and the chicken alien thing with breasts. Also the crazy bug girl.
It's a lot easier to talk about the things I liked about that game, because there were so many more things I thought sucked.
They need to stop listening to Zelda fans - they are too fat and stupid to realise it's this stuff that makes these games good and not the boilerplate fantasy crap that permeates everything else about it. Hiring some designers who aren't totally jaded might help too.
In conclusion,
http://midnafanforum.com/index.php?topic=15223.0
http://midnafanforum.com/index.php?topic=17031.0
Tingle WAS in TP, he was the hookshot game guy. TP's universe's equivalent of Tingle, where he's still a mincing weirdo, just nominally more successful.
He's also got a descendant of some sort in Spirit Tracks, or possibly some sort of relative. A picture of Tingle is poking out of the dude's store's merchandise.
Oracle of Ages is still one of my favorites simply because it was a mashup with Capcom that had items the same as in core zelda except...slightly different. For example the hookshot was now the switch hook! Instead of pulling you towards whatever you grappled you switched places with it!