I just enjoy that stuff lol. I only stopped my last Skyrim playthrough because I kept updating my mods and adding new ones and at the one point it just broke all of my saves. I took it as a sign to move on to other games.
It's shitty code bound. Sometimes no matter how powerful your hardware is, software will perform poorly because it just doesn't scale. Writing complex software like game so that it can fully utilize current hardware AND actually run faster with better CPU/GPU can become very difficult once a certain complexity threshold is reached. It's easy enough to do for a small linear game even if it has exceptional graphics, but an open world sandbox game like ones that Bethesda makes is a completely different story.
That doesn't mean that it's impossible of course - Bethesda absolutely should have made a better job, but it's by no means an easy task.
That's the plan. I haven't actually properly played F4 yet either lol (tried years ago but dropped due to performance issues). Probably will do it soon after spending a month modding it.
Potatoes? You mean PCs with < $1000 GPUs?
I'm not touching Starfield until I can play it at 1440p 60 fps with decent graphics (yes, actual 1440p, not "720p upscaled to 1440p" bullshit. Neither that nor 30 fps are acceptable to me).
If Bethesda can't be bothered to fix performance and I will need to wait years until I decide to upgrade so be it - I have plenty of great games in my "to play" list. By that time the will also be lots of mods to choose from to make Starfield worth it.