True, but some improvement on that front wouldn't hurt the games either.
I think they (bethesda) have tended to demonstrate that they agree with you on that if nothing else. While I think they have massive room for improvement, Morrowind was far less procedureally generated/lego-contructed than Daggerfall was and Oblivion was more hand-sculpted still. I think the general standard-fantasy-feel of the core Oblivion setting compared to Morrowind tends to mask that fact. The cities, architecture, NPCs, landscape, and dungeons were increasingly individualized from daggerfall to morrowind and from morrowind to oblivion. Unfortunately for Oblivion, the setting lacked the stark contrasts found in morrowind; though its Dwemer ruins, dunmer forts, and daedric shrines were possessed fewer structural variations within their categories they each felt very different from each other as opposed to Oblivion's Ayelied Ruins, Forts, etc.
Heck the only starkly different feeling category of location was the olivion realms - but their atmosphere and design meant they all felt the same despite having some significant variations between the 10 total obvlion realms (yeah there were only about 10.) The very things they did to make them feel like desolate hellscapes also made them all feel exactly the same.
While Skyrim will not give the easy distinction offered by the environs of Morrowind (with its assortment of almost-too-dramatically contrasting environs) it does offer more possibilities than Cyrodil did in oblivion. Forest, foothills, tundra, and rocky heights are significant portions of the map and appear (in the screenshots) to be thuroughly fleshed out and disctive environs. Compare this to the varied shades of irridescent green of the swamps, forests, and forested midlands of cyrodil - with the snowy regions being left feeling like white-spraypainted border fencing - and I think there's reason to feel optimistic about the depth and dictinctiveness of setting.
As far as depth and distinctiveness of characters and quests go - beyond an open world finally taking a cue from Ultima 7 in terms of NPC activity scripting - we'll have to wait and see. In some ways Radiant Story feels like it could be a step backwards. Done right it could make the world feel more dynamic (since these quests do use pre-scripted dialog and pre-written individual though conditionally flexible plots) or it could feel all too much like the Daggerfall quest system. If it simply allows interesting and novel quests/events to be more mobile in terms of how they may start or where they may take you then I'll be pretty happy. If they end up making the elements TOO flexible then we may find ourselves wondering why we're chasing down a theif who decided to run through giant-infested territory to hide in the bottom of a volcanic cave system crawling with sloads - all to try to excape with some farmer's 200 gold family heirloom. I do hope they have more sense than that and the examples described, if accurate and representative, sound far better.
On the totem pole of 'hype masters' I actually view Todd Howard as being fairly low on that totem pole. Take about any console developer and Peter Molyneux and Todd pales in comparison..
Yeah the kind of hype they use is more of a strategy that creates hype from the fan-base rather than one that requires wild claims by the producers. By keeping information as general and as sparse as they do until the game is realeased, they create an environment of rabid speculation. It's a similar idea behind many modern viral marketing campaigns and is also a similar overall tactic followed by many publishers/producers of long lived game series. It is much more obvious if you look at the lead up to releases of JRPG and japanese story-driven action games though than it is with many American titles. I'm not sure if companies like Bioware lack the discipline to stick to suck a sparse trickle of real information like Bethesda does or what. Blizzard is perhaps the most clear example of a master of this strategy of strategically minimal information release as a means to build up fan anticipation - though their requirement for large scale beta testing does mean it is not something they can reasonably persue through the release of a game.
