even WoW, being such a money-making game by a large company has its share of bugs that come out. They've even had bugs which were reported by players on the Test Realms which they didn't bother to fix before pushing the patch out. I mean, if you look at the Skyrim forums the bugs people are reporting aren't even consistent, so it's possible that Bethesda just straight wasn't able to reproduce some of the bugs in whatever testing they have until they had actual player data. The really inexcusable things would be the ones they knew about for a fact beforehand, like the save size bug.
honestly though, I wouldn't care that much if I managed to turn off auto-updating on steam before I got home from work

edit: found some 1.1.21 files on the steam forums, replaced my old files with those, seem to work. So huzzah for now.