The problem, as ever, is Bethesda's reliance on their oooooooold, badly optimised, re-used engine with terribly outdated capabilities. You expect a decade-old flawed engine to support more than 10 NPCs in the same cell? Their scripting engine, Papyrus, doesn't even have garbage collection. None. It has
zero ability to clean up orphaned script references. This is a leading cause of CTDs in savegames where mods have been uninstalled, because once a script has been activated in a save, there is no way to get rid of it, not even deleting the files from the Data folder (in fact, that will cause even
more problems).
In fact, Bethesda's own DLC files are full of ITMs ("Identical To Master" records), which are 'dirty edits' left behind by bugs in the Construction Kit which have existed since the Morrowind era. You'd think they'd do something about that by now, especially when their own plugins end up full of bugs. Modders highly recommend cleaning Bethesda's files with TES5Edit to solve many instability issues, and good luck if you own a console version of the game.
Part of me just doesn't understand how they get away with this shit, especially when it causes their game to have show-stopping bugs right out of the box. Also, why haven't they hired any decent animation talent by now? And while I'm at it, this triple-A company still can't code an engine that supports cloth physics for realistic hair or clothing? When I saw that the horses' manes and tail were baked animations, I could've laughed 'til I cried. It's tragic.
If it sounds like I'm being overly harsh on the game, it's not that. I love Skyrim, I'm currently playing it on a daily basis. There's about 80 mods I couldn't possibly play without, but still, it's a great game. It's just Bethesda. They're the whole problem with the TES series. They do fantastic lore and photogenic scenery, but ask them to make believable-looking people and we end up with
Mr Potato Head.Sorry, I haven't had a good rant about something in ages. That felt good.