Yep. The insanity of thinking you could apply it retroactively to already licensed games was absurd.
If you tied it to a future main version release with features people wanted, you could absolutely get away with some light pushback that's the usual grumbling on price changes, and a lot of developers would suck it up and move to the up to date engine anyways.
But when you try to pull the rug on people for stuff they've already been developing under previous terms, they're going to seriously reconsider, and on stuff they already published makes it extremely hard to justify working with you again.
The lower graphics quality is because the GPU can't do math. There's no way to mitigate that.
It's also absolutely none of the work involved in a port. The work on a port is entirely making the actual mechanics function on a CPU that was terrible for mobile years before the switch launched.
Graphical effects have never been the problem. They're completely irrelevant and not even sort of part of the discussion.
CPU performance is exactly the entire problem, and yes, you absolutely do have to make fundamental changes to make it functional. The CPU is the reason the majority of last gen games are straight up impossible to port in any context, and current gen games are much worse.
It's not wild speculation. The CPU is 20 tiers worse than dogshit and getting anything that's even a hint of demanding to even function at all on it is a lot of work.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's higher; there are people who mod who will also go out of their way to get achievements and people who don't care about achievements at all.
I personally love the game for what it is. There's no one else out there making anything all that similar to a Bethesda RPG. I do think that some portion saw the performance and set it aside for that reason, though. Especially gamepass people.
Because it would be hilarious to see all the platforms say fuck it and ban Unity games over this ridiculous cash grab they're very obviously not entitled to.
Also, the problem with "perfect" as your standard is that it doesn't exist. Everything is inherently tradeoffs. There are games with better gunplay than Starfield. There are games with better story telling. The games that do that are a lot smaller and more contained. As good as BG3 is at writing and presentation, even that's not perfect, and what they did do was only realistic because it's a CRPG and the story is the overwhelming majority of the development work. There are games that are bigger in terms of absolute size of the universe you can discover and land on, but they don't have the same depth of character development and combat options, the same quality or amount of hand crafted story content, etc.
You're always going to be able to point to games that do some specific element better than a given game, and the more ambitious a game is in providing a huge scope, the more things you'll be able to point to and say "X did this better" (because there are more elements to nitpick). Not every game is for everyone, but looking for failings is a bad way to explore or evaluate a game. It dramatically limits what you see.
It's a mechanically reasonably modern (it feels very comparable to Deus Ex or Cyberpunk gunplay/stealth wise, with better perk/level-up design) Bethesda RPG. You have to fly around more because it's set in space and most of space is empty, but there are still a lot of places to go and it's easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole.
My complaints are pretty mild. I'd like some kind of speeder for the empty "run a mile" bits, I miss the aimless wandering of terrestrial maps and kind of wish there had been some places set up to feel like that, and I occasionally see issues with texture loading. But it's the game the direct said it was going to be, and I'm personally very happy with it (though if it could get cleaned up enough to run a little better on my steam deck I wouldn't complain).
I think there are probably some that were loaned via audible plus or whatever, but audible says I have 440 audiobooks. Backing up the couple hundred I actually bought would be nice.