The more I read about the technical aspects of this game, the more I believe Bethesda just does not have *any* technical programmers on their staff.
They bought a license to the NetImmerse/Gamebryo engine many years ago. That engine was made by NDL. Bethesda's content-developers are probably very experienced in using the engine and the editor to create games. I understand why they wanted to continue using this engine. But that doesn't mean they needed to have a programmer on Bethesda's payroll that could do modifications to the engine. If they wanted bugfixes, modifications or new features, they could just call NDL. And ask for a new feature. That would have worked ok.
But NDL went bankrupt. About a year ago. What happened to the engine and its support ? I once worked for a startup, and our customers had in their contracts that if we went bankrupt, they would get sourcecode to our product. So that they could do some minimal support by themselves, for the products that they bought from us. Did Bethesda have a similar deal ? NDL went bankrupt a year ago, but Bethesda started work on Skyrim many years earlier. So I expect that NDL has implemented all the new features for Skyrim many years ago for Bethesda. Bethesda didn't have to have any technical knowledge in house.
This means Bethesda had the engine with new features available for Skryim. But they have no support anymore. What do you do then ? Hire one or more technical programmers to work on the engine ? They had only a year to get familiar with the engine. And by that time, the game would have shipped. Would the investment in new staff really pay off ? I bet some higher management in Bethesda decided that it would not be cost-efficient to hire their own programmer(s). They had a working engine, they had a product they could ship. Why waste more money ?
So now we have a game with an engine without real technical support. Even something as simple as recompiling the game with different flags is a problem for them. It explains why they didn't invest a few man-months to come up with an improved UI for the PC version. It explains why technical bug-fixes and optimaztions (e.g. for the PS3) take so long. Or why they might not come ever.
I think it's a management mistake. They saved a few bucks by not hiring their own technical staff. But they lost much more in credibility.
Typical short-term management-thinking.