I’ve spoken to Bethesda devs and honestly they are as baffled as we are and want the same thing you do. All the idiotic decisions that trickle down into development come from marketing, management, and executives.
Emil and Todd and the artists start with an idea that might even be good. Then it gets strangled through executive decisions, marketing strategy, idiot quest designers who’ve been there since 2004 and never take criticism well (an ex Bethesda art lead very explicitly once posted about getting raked over the coals by peers for criticizing bad writing) and then toxic positivity within the company from an inflated ego based on their fame, they call it ‘good enough as an rpg’ since most people don’t care about RPG ‘standards’, the ground level devs know there’s problems but they’re too low on the pole to speak up. And the ones higher up don’t want to rock the boat with their colleagues or make the company look too bad.

Add in the fact Bethesda has always been historically extremely small on actual devs (fallout 3 was made by like 70 actual people total) Starfield only just recently upped the team to the hundreds with thousand or so contractors, which stressed the team which wasn’t used to all this.

You start to understand it’s literally incompetence and nepotism of a handful of people at Bethesda tainting the hard work of genuinely talented developers and artists by pushing through dumb writing by nepo-hire quest designers Todd knew in college, Emil being too nice and a Dadgamer to crack the whip or tell everyone their writing and his own suck, or that his big ideas never properly get actually properly implemented - they’re all fragmented half-baked versions of the original story he pitches.

So when they get a big ego and think HIGH SALES = GAMERS LOVE US and haters are just a vocal minority of nitpicks… They push through 76 in a unfinished state, they think Starfield’s disorganized story is better than it actually is. Etc