So you'd rather not compare Bethesda's games to what else is on the market. Look I don't think anybody is saying Fallout 4 needs to have a more well written plot than The Witcher 3 or needs better companions than Dragon's Age, BUT Bethesda chooses to put those elements in the game so they should be judged against their competition.
The whole well 'thats not what Bethesda's games are about' is a cop out answer. If that was the case then you could say BioWare only cares about companions and DA2 is a masterpiece, rather than a stinky pile of poo. Games need to be judged by the individual pieces as well as the sum of the whole.
The only way Bethesda is going to better developer is if they look hard at the places where they can improve and try to do something there.
Compared to what? The absurdly repetitive and shallow radiant quests? Bethesda's games where the difficulty might be there for 4 hours rather than 15? In Fallout 3 you were killing super mutants within 3 hours. In Skyrim the much vaunted Dragon battles were jokes. Skyrim's combat amounted to clicking 2 buttons, and by the time you got decently leveled you could ignore one of those buttons.
See, these points are worth addressing. Every game has their issues--shitty combat in Bethesda games, stale side quests; closed on-rails world in Witcher 2, this adolescent understanding of maturity: booby cards yay! repetitive and endless pickup events and easy combat in W3 (still, combat way better than in Skyrim, for comparison).
The
reason, again, that issues of player character development and tight story aren't good points for comparison is because these games are still very different in their story. You don't have a set character with Bethesda: you might as well be cupcake wearing a bowler hat, it really doesn't make a difference. Some are trying to make a comparison of a well-defined character like Geralt and a blank space, and try to draw a point here. I laugh at these people, because they simply don't understand what they are talking about. "Character is important!" Yes, yes it is. I think such claims in these threads, though, come from people that don't understand the concept...(probably because these ideas were soley informed by japanese cartoons and my little pony; but I digress).
Bethesda games are not character-driven. They are player-driven. Many compromises are made, but other opportunities open up because of this. I'm not saying it's the better model, it's just what it is. I do find issues with such completely open play that you end up making bizarre and incongruent choices, events within the same world clearly conflict and most problematic: some major events seem not to matter all that much in the end.
The issue of the engine, yet again: Look, I'm talking about "Well why doesn't Bethesda use it to its full capacity?" Again--the issue of Bethesda being lazy and releasing a "half-finished" product, compromising for consoles, whatever, has absolutely nothing to do with the engine. Nothing. That is something else. The fact is that their games remain rather robust years out and the shear amount of content that people can introduce because of this, and the quality people can pull out of those engines is staggering. It's one thing to compare the vanilla engines and cry and moan about the twigs not looking like twigs in other games, then look at a mod, using the very same engine, that makes some really bitching twigs.
Ignoring the true capability of the engine to make an argument that it is shit based on dev laziness is not worth anyone's time, to be honest.