Artificiality in Gaming

I had a conversation with Liz last night and she said something that really stuck out to me: 

I think I'm starting to outgrow some of them stories. I am starting to crave more mature content and I don't mean racy or full of expletives. I mean more complex stories with deeper character development. 

What she said had me thinking about video games. Vaati, a mainstay in the Souls community, makes a lot of comments about artificial difficulty, but there's a different kind of artificiality that seems to be pervading the entire gaming universe. What I'm talking about is the artificiality of the "mature" rating for video games. There are so many games I've played in recent years, that really the only way they were "mature" is that the main character(s) just cursed every time they opened their mouth. Let me tell you something, from the perspective of a gamer, that I think devs need to understand, just because your character curses a lot, that does not make them gritty or edgy. It makes them sound overdone. 
It seems to be most common in games that are set in wartime, and I understand there's that whole saying that someone "curses like a drunken sailor." However, even in that saying, there is a distinction being placed on the sailor, namely that he or she is drunken. The idea that every single soldier is so inexplicably inarticulate, that they MUST express themselves by yelling "FUCK!" every single time they open their mouths, is laughable, but it's also pretty upsetting, that the devs that have created this whole world around the characters, couldn't be bothered to try and give them a personality. There is no prerequisite within the "grizzled veteran" archetype that states that they must curse every second. In most cases, I've found that it's actually the opposite really, with a grizzled veteran, they're usually pretty articulate. Why do people think that during the feudal ages in most countries, it was actually the warriors who were shown to be the most artistic? Heck, in Japan and China the instincts of poetry and war are still said to come from the same source. 
I guess what I'm trying to say is that game developers have more power than they've ever had before at their fingertips, but they seem to be cutting more and more corners. I can't tell you the number of games I have played recently where changing the difficulty just means you take more damage from enemies. You couldn't even... I don't know, change their colors? Give them one more behavior to show off? All you did was tweak their damage, and that's lazy. I understand with all this changing technology it costs more and more to develop, and publishers don't care if the game is finished or not when it ships, but seriously, the developers themselves should care about what they're releasing. 
I'm noticing more and more as I get older that I can't just jump into a game and pretend I live there anymore. I can't be part of the ecosystem in that game anymore because I know too much now, I am stuck on the flaws inherent in it, rather than just trying to be a part of it. Some of that is because I'm older, and that I expect more, but there's also a pretty large component of that problem coming from the games themselves. Don't you want to at least be proud of what you've released? 
Perhaps I'm just a hopeless romantic, but I still think that being able to take pride in what you've done should be more important than what you're going to get out of it.