I get the feeling that the level of popularity was a bit of a surprise, and that its warranted expanding some features beyond what was initially planned. I can see a lot of features becoming massive time sinks with diminishing returns otherwise.
Not sure why this is downvoted, radiant quests were a big feature in Skyrim, and were technically kinda impressive, but still repetitive. Likewise, quests for the College of Bards were mostly just a dungeon fetch quests and things.
It’s still a great game, but it was great for the bits that were handcrafted.
But give it 5-10 years and I’d be very interested to see another pass at procedural generation using machine learning, especially dialogue, could open the doors to more creativity than would be possible when doing it all by hand!
Which makes them superior, which is why they are used. Cost can’t be ignored any more than the torque or speed, speccing parts that are considerably more expensive that achieve equivalent results is bad engineering unless you have a very specific application that requires it.
If it was ‘objectively inferior’ we wouldn’t use them. You build to your requirements, not by playing top trumps with competing technologies while ignoring the cost.