When there are 8 people in the tavern, they are representative of the towns true population. so if the town is scaled to one tenth the size and there are 100 townsfolk, there are actually a lot more people in that tavern. Each person would represent 10 people. Unfortunately, crowds and a magnitude of people that some players want just isnt totally feasible without breaking some sense of immersion. Yes you could insert 900 more people into the scaled town but they have no place to live, sleep, eat. How is Bethesda supposed to build a world like that? The world is scaled back to feel like it is a running world and yet so they can still produce a game in a realistic amount of time.
SO next time you see 6 people in a tavern, remember, that could be 30 people, that could be 60 people. Its a scaled world!