Well i care more about the optimalization which you seem to have given up on in favor of dlcs which in turn i dont care about so there.
This right here is a fallacy. One cannot optimize a game by throwing 100 animators, writers, scripters, concept artists, 3d artists, cinematic artist... etc. In practice DLC development and optimization are independent parallel processes. You need programmers to optimize shit and a sizeable chunk of them have been working on optimization.
Optimization means taking what you have and tweak it to make it faster or less demanding. But you cannot expect miracles.
We cannot throw out and completely rethink the clothing system - one of the biggest culprits. We cannot drop or scale down the heavy emphasis on persistence. We cannot convert all slow parts of the scripted systems into code at this stage (although we did to that to some extent). Some of these systems are fundamental for what the game is in the end. It might be invisible to you. You might see no added value in it. Fair. I also think we overdo some stuff. Have you ever tried to make sense of how the NPCs in cities work in Witcher 3? What the clothing system allows? Have you ever tried to analyze its crime system and general NPC reactions to your actions? This is all the stuff we do differently and it takes its toll. It really isn't only about
You draw an open world with buildings
If we only allowed 4 non-colliding clothing slots (torso, legs, feet, hands), just like Witcher 3 does, if we spawned non-lootable graphically simplified generic NPCs around you as you move through the sapece, just like Witcher 3 or GTA does, and if we halfassed the crime system, just like Witcher 3 does, if we dissolved dead bodies within seconds and replaced them with a 10-polygon pile of goo for looting interaction, just like Witcher 3 does, KCD would be much much faster. You can bet you ass on it.
And sure, partly it's caused by CryEngine (or the version we're using). For example, I heard from our programmers that the animation system, although quite powerful, is incredibly heavy-handed when considering what an open-world game with hundreds of NPCs actually needs. And we couldn't completely rewrite that either. Or other headaches are caused by CryEngine's inability to dynamically stream entities. All instances are present in the memory at all times. We wanted to have this system dynamic but we didn't have enough people or a way to pay them when the time was right. So yeah, money as well. There you have it.
So in conclusion...
Could it run better? I guess so. Should it run better? Definitely.
Should you as a customer care abut any of this? No. And that's what I said already. The game runs poorly for you and you think you're gaining nothing for it. That's a completely valid stance and I understand it.
Also
Seriously? Pretty is how it looks not how it works. You cannot compare games with completely different art direction (one being stylized semi-realism and the other being photorealism) and draw conclusion on the inner workings based on your judgment of their artistic qualities. It would be only possible if you comapared near identical games in terms of looks and design.
PS: another patch is incoming. there will be over 900 fixes and some of it is optimization.