Seems to me like they haven't played the previous TES games. Morrowind is was 15 years ago, so of course many haven't played it, Daggerfall and Arena look hideous to modern audiences (also, Morrowinds infamous "Mercury water"). But Gameplay-wise and story-wise, they beat Skyrim quite handily.

Since yesterday i started playing Kingdoms come:deliverance and while that games has a pretty decent amount of faults it is still such a big achievement for a new studio put together just for this game backed by kickstarter to make their first game with so many mechanics included while only having 150 people to work on it.
And that game succeeds in being better in a lot of things Bethesda failed to do lately.

That happened already with Oblivion, Skyrim was yet another step down from what TES once was.

As for Fallout, Bethesda never really understood what that world is about, and though FO3 was somewhat descent RPG, it was pretty bad Fallout. FO4 was both bad RPG (though, not really RPG at all, rather FPS-RPG hybrid) and horrendous Fallout.

I had to search a while, but I found the video I was looking for. It explains the differences between Fallout 1,2, Tactics, Brotherhood of Steel and the later Fallouts, when Bethesda had the license. It'notes that while Bethesda superficially replicated Fallout mostly, they didn't understand it or it's tone and thus couldn't extract it's essence. In other words, Fallout 3 is as close to Fallout as Fallout was to Wasteland: A spiritual successor, as while it has the Fallout name, it's just not the same.

Yeah, I remember that video, I've enjoyed it, although it just scratches the surface of how much Bethesda completely missed the point of Fallout. For me, apart from great world building, dark humour, vast freedom to tackle problems in so many different ways, what really stood out are settlements, and how hugely different and uniqe they were in first two games.

I like his "Old Fallout showcased the world whose ethos was shattered by nuclear bomb. New Fallout let you build a gun that fired nuclear bombs". It sums up greatly disparity between:

Tim Cain's (creator of Fallout) - "My idea is to explore more of the world and more of the ethics of a post-nuclear world, not to make a better plasma gun"

and

Todd Howard's (Bethesda) - "We can't apologize for being a role-playing game...We need to build a first-person shooter, and it needs to be a really, really good one"

FO 1/2 are some of my most memorable gaming experiences ever and it hurts to see what Bethesda has done to that IP.

So has this thread got to the point were the old school fallout fans tell me the modern Fallout is terrible and I am not allowed to like it because it is not a real fallout game yet?

Oh, they are certainly allowed to like the new Fallout titles. It's just that Bethesda has butchered the series more and more over the years into something that simply just ain't Fallout anymore.

The reason we got to this is because someone claimed almost nobody was critical of Fallout and TES before 76 and Skyrim, and just pointed out that no, there there are many who are critical of these games, and their predecessor(s), because they changed things that older fans just didn't like or just plain didn't make any sense (like much of the newer Fallout, especially 4 and 76)

There's nothing stopping you from liking them. Bethesda's Fallouts are bad Fallouts...not bad games per se. If they were new IP, I doubt you'd hear complains from fans of original Fallout.

Forgive my derivative opinion but as long as ID Software does not go along with the immoralities of Bethesda and their newly adopted predatory monetization tactics, I'm good. I don't care anymore about Bethesda or Softworks. And I'm obviously thinking about Doom Eternal.

The second that game has the hint of a pay-to-win system, lootboxes or any other examples of that cancer, I'm done with that game too. I hope it won't and I hope the game will be good but I know better than to send those predatory companies my money.

As for Bethesda I have prepared myself to expect the worst with their only game I care for: The Elder Scrolls and I'll keep an eye open on the off chance the new game is clean but if not, and at the first sign of news of it containing even the shadow of the crap that ES Blades contains, that game will be DEAD to me and no later amount of fixing it (like I heard they did with No Man's Sky) will change my mind on it.