Bethesda's been making games for much longer than CDPR so I don't believe that they somehow don't have the budget or manpower to do things well. I think part of it (mostly graphics, not really animations) is that they insist on still using more or less the same engine since Morrowind, I guess because they don't want to build a new engine and have to figure out how to make it as moddable as their engine is now. I'm sure quite a bit of the code is rewritten and other things upgraded but if you look at Source I'd say it's similar in that you can still see the limitations of how old the engine is regardless of how many times it's been upgraded. Laziness might also be part of it. I remember there was a mod for Skyrim that fixed the HD textures the game had available to download. The textures were really good quality but they were placed on objects so badly that they looked really bad quality just from that.
I just think that Bethesda over the past 10+ years should have gotten a handle on some of this stuff, especially since while they might not be full on AAA devs like say the people who make CoD games, I don't buy that they're somehow lacking in budget or manpower.
Not that CDPR is some flawless dev in my eyes but they do well in working within their limitations more or less. Their focus on graphics (even though they didn't fully realize what they wanted to do graphically with TW3) some people might say comes at the expense of gameplay, as both TW2 and TW3 aren't really pinnacles of combat even if their RPG elements are fine. Though Bethesda doesn't excel in gameplay in my opinion even despite their seemingly small focus on graphics and animations.