I understand better what you're saying now. I think part of it is, as cwjs says, that some other games have more high end features to turn on. I think another part of it is that the game is CPU limited to 30 fps, so there's no 30fps/qualiity mode to drop down to. The game basically runs at quality mode - though being a Bethesda/Creation that largely amounts to resolution(s). I think the game looks mostly fantastic for what it is.
I would though like to have see RT reflections as an option for Series S, even though that would have required significant resolution drops to free up resources. My wishlist for updates would probably include RT reflections, faster loading times, and for console owners a 40 fps mode when using a 120hz display, perhaps with DRS. Don't know how much is likely to get shoehorned into Creation though.
Edit: Direct Storage would be nice too, though you'd want GDeflate tools to be available to the mod community. Long load areas are likely to be due to the engine initialising all kinds of stuff for that area, so DS might not end up helping all that much.
Metro seems to pay a heavy price for its lighting, and whatever they're doing doesn't scale down to Series S well. There's no area where Series S is less than 1/4 the performance of the Series X, so there's got to be some kind of overhead that isn't directly represented by resolution.
Starfield in terms of performance is right were a game scaling well would be expected to be.
