Guys, keep in mind Obsidian Entertainment made this game, NOT Bethesda Game Studios. Bethesda Softworks published it so they helped out in some ways, so don't hate on Bethesda too much. But ya, this glitch happened to me after Come Fly With Me and NONE of my saves work now..
i at least need to applaud an attempt to bring some sanity here since so many people are just flaming frustratedly.
but that being said, i very much disagree with you. as a publisher, you share accountability for the product. if bethesda was strictly a distributor of the game, then i would agree with what you are saying. however, we should make sure to hold publishers accountable for the games they sponsor. though the developers are the people in charge of the actual technical aspects of the game (which is where the flaws are manifesting themselves), they are not necessarily (and in fact most often are probably not) the ones who chose to release the game now. the publishers, as the ones with the money to fund the project, impose deadlines.
if i was to speculate on what happened here (and i'll point out that it is speculation, since i certainly don't have any inside info), i would guess that bethesda wanted the product out in time for the holiday season. despite the fact that the game had some crippling defects, i'm guessing the amount of money that they thought they would gain by releasing the game before the holiday outweighed their projected losses from the issues. so, they decided to push the game out.
maybe i'm just being sentimental here, but i feel like most developers don't want to rush out shoddy products. developers are engineers - we want the things we build to be great. not only to be functional, but to stand the test of time and still be great.
so i guess the TL;DR here would be: while development studios should certainly catch a lot of this stuff before release, we need to hold publishers accountable to not rush their products too.