I don't like Bethesda games? The amount of time I've spent on Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 says otherwise. Hell, I'm right now doing yet another playthrough of Skyrim.

The best way to understand what's wrong with the creation engine, and how woefully out-dated it is, is to listen to what modders have to deal with constantly. The creation engine is hardly a serious upgrade of Gamebrio and BGE only puts in the minimal effort into actually updating it.

At its core, and the major reason why exploration is so stilted in Starfield, is that the creation engine just isn't capable of solving the floating point problems with seamless worlds, which other engines ARE capable of. Pathfinding generation and animation sorting hasn't been seriously updated since Oblivion, and the Papyrus script engine still has the same 200 limit it had since Morrowind, a limitation that was there because of hardware of that time, but forcing Papyrus to go over the 200 limit causes Bethesda games to become unstable.

Yes, it's BGE and their practices that are the problem, and it's reflected in how they maintain their engine too.