I think the gaming community severely overstates the amount of people that mods their games. I wouldn't be surprised if less than 20% of Skyrim's players have ever used mods, and I'm damn sure having mod support or not wouldn't have any considerable change on their sales.
Every leak points to a remaster, using gamebryo for the game's logic and UE5 for the rendering part. Some leaks also mentioned it'll have an updated HUD, archery, stamina and blocking mechanics, but we don't know anything else.
You can simply not use any of the AI features. The studio claims the genAI is a model trained solely on material their artists and devs created for this exact purpose and it runs locally, and as far as I know there is nothing in the game that uses genAI other than what the players can generate.
UE doesn't get "near rebuilt from the ground up every major release", that would be an absurd waste of time and resources every time. It's being updated and iterated over, just like how CE is.
The problem here is that you don't like Bethesda games and jumped on the bandwagon of armchair developers using the engine as a scapegoat, ignoring the fact that many other mainstream game engines are just as old or more.
Creation Engine is the least of Bethesda's games problems, it's their game design that's the big issue and the reason why thinks are so bleak.
Also game very much recommends RTX 4000 series or better with frame gen turned on.
Capcom straight up recommends frame gen to get 60 FPS, which is not what the current frame gen tech was made for, it's ridiculous how bad this game runs
The issue there is 4K, even with upscalers it's a massive rendering job for GPUs. Realistically, only the 4090 and 5090 could run in high settings at 4K (with or without upscaling). I had a 4K monitor with my 7900 XTX and decided to dial back to 1440p (and got a n OLED screen too) so I could run my games at max on 120 or 144 FPS, because at 4K I would get anything between 50 and 100 fps with a mix of high and medium settings
I think Avowed is the smoothest (strictly comparative) game on UE5 I've played in a long time. I get 120fps locked on epic and no shader compilation stutters (1440p, 7900XTX and 7800X3D, FSR quality) outside of cities. As soon as I enter a city and move my camera/character, it dips to 50fps with my GPU barely being used and CPU spiking, which really doesn't make much sense to me considering the aren't a lot of NPCs in town and they don't move/have routines