Well in lore... but i see your point.

This^^^

The cities are small enough that they didn't have to be their own cell. They should have been bigger. Solitude, representively, should have been the smallest of the walled cities. So what I mean is that Riften (which I think is the smallest of the walled cities) should have been the size that Solitude is now.

Well, it's a bit rough and cold up in the north. So I would go with hard terrain to for farming so less food. Less food less people and smaller cities. Don't know about natural resources and how rich the province is so importing food could be costly due to harsh terrain and reachability. Hasn't there been a lot of fighting too with the great war and what have you. And probably half or more of the children die before advlthood.

It's one thing to advocate smalish cities, another to recognizetech limitations don't currently allow for much bigger ones.
Cities in Skyrim aren't really cities. Glorified pueblos, some would say.

I'm hoping next gen consoles will allow for a bigger gameworld, bigger, open, cities and villages.
You say you want keep cities as they are.
I say the opposite.

Highly disputable defensive reasoning you got there.
200 years have passed.
People get marry, have kids, lots of them, as they used to in ancient times since then kids could be put to good use, i. e., labour force.
Now, restoration magic and various healing cults take the place of your National Healthcare System.
And though the climate is tough, it's not uniformly so. There certainly does not seem to be a scarcity of goods.
LAstly, cities need a certain critical number of services and population to function properly. S
Skyrim's don't have them.

Let's address the final argument: Civil war.
#1 The Civil War, as far as I can remember, is a relatively recent event. The consequences would be felt in 10 or 20 yeras.
#2 In fact, as I travel through SKyrim, there doesn't seem to be a civil war going on. I hardly ever bump into enemy camps, and there's not a skirmish to be seen.

I swear people are making the towns smaller as they go along. We started out with 'ten' or a 'dozen,' now it's 'three or four.' There's at least twenty, though, and near enough a hundred NPCs in most of the major ones. Each with their own dialogue, fully-decorated house, and weekly routine.

I don't think their number is the issue here.
For once,
size matters.

Oh, so clever.

Exactly. We gave up greaves, pauldrons and robes under armor for more NPCs and what we actually got is less NPCs. I'm disappointed.

Well, by "towns" i meant the ones in separate worldspaces, the rest are villages

I think they are scaled about right for the landscape. If they made them too big they would seem out of place.

Whiterun and its surrounds with the farms, windmills, brewery and watchtowers covers quite a bit of land.
Riften is quite elaborate as well with all the stuff outside the walls, the docks with warehouses, and the farms and estates.

My understanding is Skyrim like New Vegas is scaled down and the real Skyrim is about the size of Washington State so I figure that the cities are actually vastly larger with many more buildings and more people than what we get to see in the game. I imagine in 10 years we'll see another Skyrim that won't be 50k in size but maybe 50 miles instead and the cities will be massive and the game will run us over 300 hours and it will be amazing.

I think it is kind of stupid considering that games like Witcher, Two Worlds 2, do large settlements pretty well.

I'll give some examples to prove this.

You've never seen holes in the ground for the caves and dungeons.
If Riften was that size not finding the Theives guilde could only be possible by simple laziness.
The great graveyard that is supposed to be awe impressive is small. (the real thing is described as stretching for miles)

You can find more examples that Skyrim is actually bigger if you look at the rate of undiscovered locations when it takes a hour's in game walk from town to get to them.

They already separated cities from the game world and gave them their own special cells. This means that the PC games already took the compromise and will now need to wait for some talented moders to fix this. Considering that the sacrifice was already made, why couldn’t they have made bigger cities and divided them into cells?

I do, because I am an educated gentleman!

The cities in Skyrim are a joke. I'm guessing Bethesda didn't have enough time to make cities and towns. I'm wating for a better cities mod to fix this problem.