Actually, I think there's no real incentive or even interest for Bethesda to improve these areas. I mean, after Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim it should be pretty clear that aspects such as telling a good story, providing strong and memorable characters, and crafting game world that is cohesive and makes sense isn't what Bethesda are interested in. Rather, they have a kind of sandbox-y approach to the genre, i.e. the see the game world as a kind of open playground where the player is more or less free to do whatever he or she pleases and where the individual attractions or activities do not necessarily combine into a cohesive whole. Which is fine by itself, I guess. But it's just a totally different conception of what constitutes an RPG if you compare this to, for example, the Witcher or the Gothic series. In other words, the game world for the latter type of games acts as a backdrop or scenery (meaning that it has, above all, to provide believable and convincing surroundings for the stories and characters that the game is presenting to its audience), whereas for the former type it acts as a playground (meaning that it has to offer a large and varied selection of possible individual activities and distractions for the player without them necessarily being connected to each other).
The Bethesda hate just stems from the unfortunate fact that Fallout 1 and 2 (and New Vegas) clearly fall into the former category whereas Bethesda's interpretations fall into the latter category. It's no wonder that fans of the former entries regard the latter ones as total bastardizations of the series.