Writers as well. One of the longtime writers for the TES series (Daggerfall till Oblivion) was laid off and was given what was essentially a cameo for Skyrim (I believe he was credited for a couple of the in game books to do with past events in the lore). He appears to be completely uninvolved in 6.

And he's gotten worse at it over the years. Like he ostensibly wrote the Tenpenny Tower storyline/quest for FO3, and then rehashed it in Starfield except worse because the literal only options there were siding with a CEO who wanted you to either commit genocide, convince an entire people to become his slaves, or give his mass murdering oligarch buddy a huge commission to let the generation ship leave without murdering or enslaving them. Whereas with Tenpenny Tower you could just kill Tenpenny on the spot, all the corporate freaks on that planet are invincible and the quest literally cannot even be failed, it can only resolve by you doing what they want.

Like FO3 was bad and railroady in bad ways (with its forced loss in a cutscene and nonsensical original ending), but Starfield is even worse in all of those ways and I can't help but see it as Emil getting increasing creative control and driving away everyone with actual talent.

Hes just a symptom of the lack of quality in Bethesda, its not like he single handed wrote all of fallout 4 and starfield

He did say Skyrim's story was "mediocre," and honestly I think that's being generous as far as the main quest goes.

It kind of sucks for Skyrim because the story is also extremely setpiece oriented, but setpieces need to either be very mechanically good (so nearly none in Skyrim) or tie into something that makes them feel good (so nearly none in Skyrim) and otherwise it feels like being locked into an amusement park ride.

I'm on this level with Bethesda games too. Who else is out here trying to make a game where every single broom is interactable? There's a magic to that kind of simulationist game design which is the reason why people still mod and play the crap out of Skyrim and FO4, even though I also agree that Bethesda have gotten worse at doing it every single time.

The alternatives, games like The Outer Worlds and Avowed, flop for me because instead of leaning into what's unique about the game style they spend all of their effort trying to fix the things that are "broken" with it, which just results in a kind of mid open world experience.

You're hired!