"Skyrim has a locked framerate because going higher than the limit actually breaks the damn game."
Forget about that...the game engine was so poorly optimized on launch that they didnt even set an SSE flag in the compiler. Yes, thats right, Skyrim at launch, in the year 2011 was using x87 and MMX code. A wonderful enthusiast who went by the name of Alexander Blade, if memory serves, created a wrapper that translated the calls to SSE (Skyboost?), like every freaking modern cpu capable of running the game in the first place had on board. MAJOR performance boost. Thats just inexcusable--and if it was a matter of stability, why didnt they fix the million other game-crashing bugs before launch?
People love to say devs are lazy, but my God, this was one of the silliest omissions ever. Bethesda eventually released the properly optimized code in an official patch a month or two later.
Bethesda has a bad habit of relying on the modders to fix and optimize their launch games in the FO/ES universes. Thank God for these people.