If i'm not mistaken, when Skyrim hits in 11/11/11, it will have been in the oven for just over three years. Does anyone think this is a relatively short development cycle for such a huge, ambitious game built on a brand new engine? I'm a positive dude, and can't wait for the game regardless, but this makes me worry a little about the quality of the end product. I have faith though!

Try slightly over 5 years and you're a bit closer, as well as having a significantly larger development team this time round, I believe.
Shivering Isles doesn't really count as that was all (or very nearly all) content rather than game, freeing up developers to develop while contenters contented SI alongside.

They've had plenty of time to do it, and more people than they had last time.

In one of the recent podcasts, I believe Todd said they've been designing Skyrim since Oblivion's release (2006), and producing resources for it "full time" since Fallout 3's release (2008). I initially thought the same as you, but the more I think about it, the more "design" seems like a significant and time-consuming part of completing a finished game.

It's also worth taking into account the man-hours involved - a team of "about 100" people have been working all out on Skyrim since 2008, which is a far larger team than the one that worked on Oblivion (not to mention earlier games).

I believe they started working on it as soon Oblivion was released with just a handful of people coming up with concept art and ideas. The majority of the team were working on Fallout 3 at this time. Once FO3 was released the whole team came together to focus on Skyrim.

I think their dev team is now at around 100 members, and when they were working on Oblivion they only had about 60.

I'm sure that they just started working on it full scale then and that they have worked on it on a smaller scale since Oblivion was finished.

Where do you get your info from? Bethesda was working on Fallout 3 for most of that time. Do you have a link or anything I can look over? I actually read that it was two years in development by August 2010. I truly hope you are right. 5 years with more people would be awesome, and alleviate any doubts i'd have, few they may be.

Podcast 6: http://bethblog.com/podcast/

Thanks for all the quick replies! I'll go over this when I get home from work tonight.

It's not only that it has to do a lot with how much of the new elder scrolls creation kit (formerly the elder scrolls tool set) is reused from both the geck and elder scrolls tool sets as well. You kinda have to line things up ahead of time and make the kit mailable during the development process.

Now that the programers have finished the construction set, I wonder what they are working on now.

oblivion's team was 50-60 people, skyrims team is about a 100? + they know the platforms now.

If they are to make Skyrim available for consoles that have not technologically evolved since Oblivion, I guess they have less work to do technologically than if they intended to push our PC new components to their limits.
Moreover, I think that the gameplay tools (quest compass, super satelite view, easy fast travel, small map, lack of choices in dialogs...) introduced to replace player skills (like investigation, intrigue, naviagation, sociability...) are much easier and cheaper to introduce than having to build a system where NPC can give literal directions, have a whole dialog tree and a lore database to talk about...
Therefore, I do not see Skyrim as a long and ambitious development process but more like a recycling of preexisting gameplay ideas and tools.
I don't know if the story will be interesting, but if it's not interactive like for oblivion, it doesn't that much amount of work.

I remember clearly that in some dev diary a dev stated that when Bethesda started making expansions for Morrowind, the engine programmers shifted their attention completely to Oblivion (Oblivion was being made parallel with Tribunal and Bloodmoon). It's not like they work purely on a single title at a time - different parts of the team work on completely different schedules and projects. So my guess is 5-6 years is a much more accurate estimate.

Todd Howard stated on Bethesda Podcast (Link up above thanks to Fearless Hero) that the work on Skyrim started right after Oblivion, probably a team diverged and started pre-production and another small team started to create the engine while the big team worked on Fallout 3.

That's 5 years, not only this is enough time but their crew is now of 100 people which is a lot, Fallout 3 was made in 2 years (not counting pre-production) with 70~.