I agree with Skyrim, but at least the bones are there for the modding community which ended up doing Bethesda's work and turning it into a decent game. I didn't mind the paring down of skills as much as I hated that they butchered the magic system. But modded, it's still one of my favorite games even if doesn't beat out Morrowind as my all time favorite from the series.
Even as a framework for mods it just mostly reuses previous tools. At least Bethesda themselves could have made the script extender rather than waiting for the community to develop. It tells us that they are willing to give modders the bare minimum and expect them to make additional tools themselves, which would be fine if the base game had well functioning mechanics. But it doesn't, and some things you cannot change via modding, so we are stuck with them unless an entirely new engine is developed. But Bethesda doesn't want to do any of this, nor does it want to help the community.
But still, even with all that, their primary focus was to make a game, not a modding framework, and they miserably failed, even though by that point that had enough experience to do so.
