It's kinda hard to respond to you with this when everyone else is arguing "they gave us Skyrim in space instead of innovating at all in the last 20 years". In fact, just looked back and that's the exact family of criticism I was responding to.

There is no adventure in Starfield because “space is empty, and boring” - Todd Howard.

Space is empty and boring but still has more hand-crafted (non-procedural) content than the entirety of Skyrim. New Atlantis is arguably as big as the 3 largest Skyrim cities combined. The main quest+faction dungeons are as big as the equivalents in Skyrim. The New London battlefield (for example) is pretty gorgeous and fairly massive.

There's a genuine argument that maybe we don't have enough "sprinkled in random places "quest starts that aren't radiant, considering it's only 50% more than Skyrim has but an dramatically larger universe. More quests that start like Mantis could go a long way, where you're nudged towards the quest regardless of proximity. BUT, saying "there is no adventure in Starfield" seems somewhat off to the actual facts of the game... that there's 50% more adventure in Starfield than Skyrim, but the map is 1000x larger.

Stop using "it's a bethesda game" as an argument. It's weak and biased. It also deflects the fact that Bethesda games are actually marketed as RPG's so they have to be compared to what available from other studios when talking flaws and features. You might think it's enough but it's not a valid argument. Bad AI and meaningless quests are not stylistic choices, they're weaknesses. Also you have to address the criticism instead of pointing out other aspects of the game. Trying harder might not have been specific enough but what I meant is they don't seem to work on the major issues they get criticised for over and over again. And by "they" I also don't mean the individual devs but the company as a Whole. The presence of NG+ does nothing to improve on the abysmal npc AI or astonishing amount of loading screens and fast travelling.

In all honesty, I've never heard or read about the issues you are talking about. Even when googling about the NG+ addition it just talks about Starfield, post-release anwyay. And the complains were not "basically not an Outer Worlds sequel". It was a let down that it isn't closer, but the complains are about the lack of meat on Starfields large, dry bones. Outer Worlds is just used often as comparison because of the whole Obsidian/Bethesda past collab that make them very similar at their core especially since both are space themed. Nobody not fanboying was actually expecting Outer Worlds 2. The more optimistic were hoping some step forward but unfortunately, the pessimists were right.

That brings to your next point: bigger does not equal better. Bigger is actually a trap. The bigger the map, the harder it is to populate and bring to life in a meaningful way and Bethesda sucks at this. Here it's once again just large inaccessible buildings nobody lives in and NPC's just going nowhere 24/7. New Atlantis is the best example of a "big" map that feels completely dead. Nothing happens anywhere in any city that is not scripted anyway. Everybody is patiently waiting the player crosses the trigger that pushes "play" on the tape. I'd be way more excited if Betheda announced a game that brought back the scale to something like Fallout 3.

And you can't be honestly saying it was polished and optimized. Todd Howard himself has been consistently caught saying it was optimized in interviews post release when the game still didn't work properly on XBOX. He also blamed the gamers for poor hardware and told them they'd need to upgrade. This is bullshit, they simply didn't take enough time, they rushed the release. They also repeatedly said they know the modders will fix for free what their billion dollars microsoft backed studio can't be bothered with. And nobody is asking for more hand holding. It's actually a common complain on many AAA rpgs and openworld games that everything is a freaking waypoint on your map and you end up looking at your compass more than the scenery. Starfield is no different here, it's worse since you can rarely reach any waypoint without multiple loading screens and fast travels.

So yeah, I still believe if they listened and tried harder in bettering themselves, you would still get your "bethesda game" experience but better. Their games feel designed by a consulting firm that did a market evaluation and chose the easily added features instead of the core rebuild of their engine and expansion of the writing team. Shiny graphics and large maps are vague enough to hype up the people to pre-order while not actually having to improve gameplay experience, character building and meaningful world events which are hard to showcase pre-release, not to mention to actually do.