
pick up an item, sit in a chair, sleep in a bed) IS your script lag, at least generally speaking. If the length of time is above a certain threshold, you can actually see and feel script lag occurring, for example if you activate an object, the amount of time it takes for that object to actually activate(ie. Script lag is the amount of time it takes for your game to start running a function.

So what they did was hardcode the gears of this radiant masterpiece to ONLY allow a very limited set of quests that operated entirely linearly. Somewhere along the line, likely in the last stages of development, the devs look like they ran out of time and could not complete the dynamic campaign. Dialogue was recorded, scenes were created, and scripts were set up. There were quest rewards, series of dialogue, and it was far more dynamic than any other kind of radiant quest in Skyrim. Regardless, each hold was to be won by doing up to TWELVE RADIANT QUESTS, as opposed to up to TWO in vanilla skyrim.

In the planned version, it's my guess that the designers were going to create some kind of map menu for the player to decide which hold he wanted to hit next, and allow the enemy to counterattack as well.

The underlying framework of the civil war was designed to be a completely dynamic series of campaigns for holds, incorporating elements of strategy and diplomacy to bring your opponent down. Skyrim's civil war is a much bigger animal than you could possibly imagine.
