Well, the issue is that few "RPGS" really are RPGS anymore, what's being called dated is pretty much what defines the genere. Doing things like giving the player character a voice tend to get in the way of more important things like character creation and choosing to be what you want rather than being given a character. It's incredibly disconcerting to have a clear idea of who your character is, and then have a voice that doesn't fit, or crap shooting out of his mouth that you don't think fits. The only game that even tried to find a compromise was actualyl a third person sandbox shooter... "Saint's Row 2" in fact, but since then nobody has picked up the torch of having multiple voiceovers for the main character to at least give you some kind of choice there.
As far as the level of NPC animations and such, I think that's a matter of the scale of the game. It's easy to say "I want all these ultra-expressive supporting characters" but understand in a big game, especially a sandbox, the game has to track all of this stuff at once and it's going to choke the system. Your looking at a situation where you have a choice of epic scope and limited NPCS, or limited scope and epicly developed trivial NPCs.
I think to an extent "Rage" is the flipside of the coin, you had all kinds of expressive NPCs that people have been praising, but you also have less stuff going on around those NPCs at any given time, it's just tracking less with a far less complicated engine allowing for it to have those kinds of details.
I don't think it's Skyrim being dated, so much as the give and take of modern technology, with people wanting to have everything at the same time, when we just don't have powerful enough personal computers in the hands of enough people to make it a viable course of development.
