How is it bad? From what I know, we don't have much quests, not sure if any is added, we don't have no new spells, weapons, NPC enemies. All we have is the ability to build a house and adopt kids. Mind you I am not complaining, but content wise, we are getting far less from what we paid for the vanillia game. Or is we go this way, maybe Skyrim should have costed $200 then with the content that we got.
I also remember something like Hearthfire was given away for FREE for Morrowind as "plug ins".
Not complaining, glad to have Hearthfire, and can't wait to try it out.
The point is that DLC pricing isn't determined by its content relative to the original game.
Hearthfire adds a whole level of gameplay to the original game. You can't sum it up by saying "3 houses=1/15 of a dragon-slaying".
And when Morrowind was out, there was no such thing as DLC. The plugins were the occasional minor-but-fun extras that Bethesda still throws in with Skyrim patches. Hearthfire already adds far more to the game than any of those plugins did.