Is it natural to expect MUCH more from Bethesda, who are not an indie studio, and who are suposedly sitting on a mountain of gold after the success of Oblivion and F3?
The problem as I see it is that Beth can't compete with more specialized games in their level of detail. Tes has stealth, but can't do it like Thief because a stealth oriented game will always be more refined in stealth than a game that just happens to have some stealth in it. It can't compete with Crysis in graphics. It's just one of the downsides of making a game set in a huge open world where you can do a lot of things and interact with a load of objects. It will be good in some aspects, satisfactory in others and bad in others.