I'm not a computer person and you're right these games are pushing the PS3 far further than Dust BUT they come from coding teams who know the architecture and system inside out. The GT team have spent years and years and years working with the PS3 and even then you can argue they ran into similar memory limitations with GT5/6 even in offline play. Battlefield, GTA, Destiny have had large teams and multiple releases to get things right and when they didn't work they had money and people to throw at the problem too. As has been pointed out earlier they also arguably fewer stats, combinations and variations to track than Dust does too. (Hence the discussion around whether or not more and more proto in a battle causes more lag due to the greater number and variety of modules that the game is trying to track at any one time)

I'm relatively new here so don't know all the ins and outs but Dust had a troubled start, multiple development teams etc and has never really recovered from it. If it had been in the position to have been having it's core code constantly worked on and optimised since it's release then yes I'm sure it would be able to be far more impressive. You're correct it's not all down to the console per say, humanity put a man on the moon with something like 64Kbyte of memory on the lunar module, but damn was that good code.

You can see the problems of the legacy in the game with things like huge redlines and massive amounts of unusable map space every battle and as was said above things like the fact that MCC's are still considered vehicles for times when they were mobile and intended to potentially be piloted. (I'm also old enough to remember the ridiculous amounts of universal lag that trying to sail the carrier in Battlefield 1942 used to case).

It isn't ideal and it is a problem but the people currently working on the game are doing the best they can within the limitations imposed on them by numbers, knowledge and money. Rattati comes from a financial background not a dedicated cell processor game coding one for example. At present the dev team are only able to try and work around these issues rather than out and out fix them and I think they're doing a pretty good job under less than ideal circumstances. Things like SKINS are a really good example of this as they slowly try to chip away at the problems without removing versatility/features.

I'm not saying the game is perfect and that CCP haven't made mistakes, recently and historically, but the guys working on it at the moment really are trying to do the best they can for the few thousand people who still play and enjoy this game.

Ahem as mentioned before

GTA 5 is not only a single player game but the order of magnitude of things tracked is immensely smaller. A gta player vs a dust 514 player is probably order of magnitude 1,000x variables apart. Leaving lots of memory able to LOD stream objects, scripts, schedules and the likes to only what the player sees and in close proxima to his location. The streaming however has issues for example. If the player moves significantly faster than the LOD can handle there is geometry that is psychically there that will not render before it is too late; This has crashed many jets during high traffic times. near bridges. The game is entirely running on a very slim number of rules as notable with the excessively large number of glitches caused by situations arising to which the set rules cannot deal with it and was found to be within acceptable vision. One doesn't need to browse far to see the excessive number of glitches. Memory management of assest is still a major issue still at times; Misplaced vehicles because the game forgets where objects; failure to render completely; ghosts are more common in gta than you think and finally the extremely simple physicist engine deemed acceptable to cartoon standards.

GT6 has even far less things to track; if realistic crashing was a thing then there be more but GT doesn't even want that to be a hallmark in their game. And like many high end graphical games the number of cheats they use is stupidly high all taking math but none the less delivers more for less cpu. Start modding those graphics options off and the game starts to look like crud real quick.

Wipeout example is rather silly since its the linerider example here in terms of complexity.

BF4 player attributes come closer to dust but the number of items are about 100x apart. Major differences is limited loadouts; linear progressions; no overhead stat altering system like the skill system; and very few weapons in the game number of properties though are near on par. BF4 also uses as custom engine the studio is very close with and knows its ever dark secret. Necode is highly experinced at this with about 12 games behind the team. Also the graphical engine for BF4 is very lightweight and turns ugly fast if you peel the layers out. Vehicles have zero adjustable properties so all copies of them are always the same. Despite running better in multiplayer the single player of BF4 has massive amounts of hilarity of issues to the point you almost have to question if the devs even played it.

No a more proper comparison on complexity would be

Borderlands being 32 players vs Dust 514 being 32 players.
and no borderlands at 32 players aint happening ps3 gen for sure.

Not arguing your expertise but just to check what in your perception is the impact performance of the moods?

Mood impact has been found to be minimal.