TL;DR: Skyrim is an evil omen.

Here Roderick models a tweed jacket +2 vs. thesis advisers and shoots rays of withering condescension out of his eyes.

Imagine I’m a doctor for PC games.  Not a doctor of PC games, mind you; as yet there’s insufficient rigor in the field to support post-graduate study.  Some day, friends, we'll sit by the fireplace, sip port, smoke pipes, and have intellectual conversations about the merits of WASD.  But anyway, in this metaphor I’m a doctor for PC games.  They come to me and I diagnose their ills.  In this capacity I've recently had an office visit from Skyrim.  It presented with atrophied textures, a 60-degree field of view, and a comically bad interface.  I didn’t need to see anymore.  “Ah ha!” I cried.  “Diagnosis:  consolitis!”  It was the shortest episode of House ever.  

I’m a hands-on type who believes we needn’t take quietly what we’re given.  With a surgeon’s arrogant optimism I grabbed a speculum and got elbow-deep ink Skyrim’s .ini files.  I pulled depth perception out of its rendering canal with judicious anticlockwise torque.  While I had my dexterous parts up in there I deposited a few texture pack suppositories to mitigate the ugliness.  The interface was gangrenous and threatening the entire organism, so I changed my gloves, hacked off its grottiest parts and attached a prosthetic SkyUI.  The result was a reasonably attractive game with a very bad, but useable, interface.  Mission sort of accomplished, I sat and basked in the glow of professional success, having taken in an atrociously bad port and sent it limping back out into the world, ready to contribute to society as a mostly playable piece of electronic entertainment.

So Skyrim is (mostly) fixable; good news, but what does it tell us about Bethesda's attitude towards the PC platform?  Consider the FOV.  Adding an FOV menu option to Skyrim would have cost precious time and money but, happily, the game's default FOV can be set via an .ini file, i.e. with 20 seconds in Notepad.  This means there’s an easy, cheap solution:  type a line in the file, have a cup of tea and pat yourself on the back for a job well done.  Bethesda didn't go this route, and we can only wonder if it was the tea or the pat on the back that exceeded its budget.

We're all lonely sometimes Captain, but has it really come to this?

Bethesda spent only the time needed to get Skyrim PC (mostly) running and shipped it.  We may be glad that many of its failings have been mitigated by modders but I think that's the most discouraging aspect of the whole affair.  Legions of gamers bought an awful port and dozens of them are working for free to fix it. What Bethesda have accomplished here is a profitable shifting of the development burden to users.  Considering the rewards of this strategy, what incentive is there for publishers to take PC development seriously?