Why has the perfect game not been produced (RPG-wise)? Because it's not a viable venture.
Check out the biggest RPGs out there. They took years to make, and have longer development times than many other game genres, but not necessarily bigger teams and/or budgets.
Now look at them again. Since the mid-1990s they have been bugfests of the highest order, needing many patches just to be considered playable, and fan patches to be considered the best. Not because the developers were incompetent, but because the games were so damn complex. Before that was an era of resource-intensive RPGs being released to a public that didn't have the hardware to play them, and before that an era of such limited computational power that creating the perfect game (RPG-wise) was a physical impossibility.
Where are the studios that made those big RPGs? Gone. All of them. The ones still standing are only
claiming to be good RPG studios, dangling on the legacy of one good title that they somehow fluked into making, but they're the ones that have thinned out the RPG formula the most. Bioware made it big with Baldur's Gate 2... and look where they are now, an absolute joke. Bethesda took one of the most intelligent game series of the past 20 years and turned it into a product for morons.
And then there are the fans. You lot, reading this right now. You're here because you're passionate for your RPGs, but is that passion getting the better of you? There's a reason the RPG Codex has such a bad rep, and that is the
unbridled passion we've shown for these games, for better and (most definetly) for worse. There are genuinely insane people here that won't settle for some guy on the internet disagreeing with them about Oblivion or Dragon Age or the Gold Box games or whatever, and will take some kind of action to show that. This is why we have this meme:
How many of you actually bought copies of those big RPGs when they were released? I did my part, bought numerous games back when they were new, including some of the finest RPGs ever made. (I still have the games, in their boxes and such.) But that didn't help those studios, did it? How many of you actually supported your favorite RPG developer before the age of Kickstarter, which not only showed game developers to have the integrity of beggars, but that it's lucrative for them to stoop so low? How many of you are supporting them now, and how far are you willing to take that support?
The developers who made those big RPGs were as passionate about making them as we, the fans, are passionate about them today and can engage in some lively discussions about them today. But RPGs are sadly not likely to pay the bills, and the effort needed to put into a RPG title, compared to the returns, is just not favorable for them. It's been an uphill battle since the start, and there's no sign of the road leveling out ahead of us. Yet we remain here, trudging on, hoping.