I’d say it’s the right call that cliffhangers aren’t viable currently with 10-15 year gaps between series games that Bethesda seems to have shoehorned themselves into. Also pretty dirty that he wasn’t made the TES6 game director after the success of TES5 and the position being promised for 6. Being told that he’d be directory for TES6 and then waiting 11 years for production to start and then being told you won’t be director is bad leadership on Todd’s part. Kuhlmann could have been funded to start working on growing a splinter team after the last Skyrim expansion or Fallout 4 so they wouldn’t be stuck in these 10-15 year gaps between games in a series. Ideally same for someone to do the same for a Fallout 5 after 4 while Todd Howard led Starfield.

It’s not teams from scratch. It’s splinter teams that have senior leadership from the previous games and experienced mid-career employees incorporating new juniors and new mid-career hires. It’s the path of maintaining and passing on institutional knowledge and retaining talent so they don’t feel like their career has capped out where they’re at so if they want to have the directorial control that they’ve spent a career working towards, they won’t take all their knowledge off to another company