You're very right. Dick move of them to hear about Skyblivion and instead of thanking the heavens for plopping a marketing opportunity for minimum effort, went "crush them out of principle".
The Bethesda remake is supposedly using some Frankenstein of the original engine shoved into unreal. It'll suck.
Though in their defense, it's not being done by Bethesda at all. It's being done by some studio who has mainly only done support work for other studios bigger games. I think called Virtuoso?
My guess it’s to test out what they’re building for TESVI by getting a smaller studio to test it out in something they’ve already got design docs and scripts for.