There are some great people at Bethesda, creating an engine that is capable of what Skyrim is capale is no small feat, so I'm sure they are perfectly aware of w

There are some great people at Bethesda, creating an engine that is capable of what Skyrim is capale is no small feat, so I'm sure they are perfectly aware of what they are doing. Its hard to believe that they 'forgot' to turn on optimizations or optimize critical code paths, they simply didn't because they are probably fixing show-stopper bugs which is much more important (I'm saying this as a game developer.) Part of it I believe is that we are spoiled by title updates, they allow developers to ship games earlier (before extensive QA testing or bug fixes) but at the same time is what the fans want and makes sense financially for their company. So I doubt these modders can do a better job than the professionals at Bethesda, if anything they can do the trivial things that would take any novice programmer a day with a profiler.