I have noticed that there are a lot of people mistaking the "Adventure" genre for the "RPG" genre.

The main victim is The Legend of Zelda series. I had always thought that they were classified as adventure games (in fact, the first Legend of Zelda pretty much invented the adventure genre) and the only game in the series that I found to have some RPG elements was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; yet I find all of these people who are even calling the newest Zelda games RPGs. I even found someone who said that Super Metroid is a side-scrolling shooter with RPG elements... Metroid is also a series of games I had always thought were adventure games.

I guess you could say that each game has RPG elements because your character learns new abilities as you play the game, but that's really about it. They never level up, they don't have any numerical statistics for their different abilities, there isn't a huge abundance of different armor, weapons, or accessories to choose from, etc.

Am I the one who doesn't have a very good understanding of the two genres, or are there other people who feel the way I do?