Has anyone here argued that Bethesda's engine lags in terms of overall feature-set and dev-friendliness?
The discussion was mainly about run-time performance and stability.
Having a robust I/O management system for item location/form tracking is not a task necessarily more (or less, depending on specific implementation) CPU intensive than say constructing a Bounding Volume Hierarchy for path-tracing (which typically happens on the CPU, not the GPU.)
Especially when the prior is mostly done when loading/saving a save file (and not typically as you play the game) whereas the latter is (now) done in real-time.
This isn't to say that Bethesda's accomplishments aren't impressive. I do agree that Starfield looks much better (relative to its competitors) than previous Bethesda titles did with respect to their competition. I also agree that their engine is pretty awesome from an engineering perspective.
But many of the systems Bethesda has implemented are natural evolutions/scale-extensions of systems they have had for decades. They're hard to implement, and Bethesda has done a good job at implementing them (although they had the time to perfect them), but it isn't clear where the difference is that would make these systems especially more demanding in Starfield (with respect to the platforms they're running on) than they were in prior releases.
Furthermore, game development has moved toward middle-ware, for better or worse. Even Nintendo, a company that is known to prefer proprietary solutions, uses middleware for many of their games. Why? Because this allows the developer to focus on things that aren't engine development. There is a huge gain from dividing and specializing the labor used to develop a game engine from that to develop a game.
