Good god your inexperience is showing. This as "RPG lite" as you can possibly get, and no, the "gameplay" is not good by any means. I just found a review that shares my exact sentiments on what Skyrim actually is and how you have to approach it. You can't think about it, you can't ponder on the future or your character, you have to just "let it happen". In other words, you can't enjoy it without shutting off your brain, because if you don't, you'll spend too much time thinking about what it's not.
http://www.honestgamers.com/reviews/9740.html
Those are all really good points and are true, but why do you buy a Bethesda title thinking you're going to get something from Bioware?
This is what Bethesda does and this is what its games are like. There is always room for improvement and everyone knows that Bethesda's games' menus are all unwieldy and tend to make the game stop/start when you get low on health or need to change weapons or gear. That said, I prefer that to Diablo's massive potion click/button-mashing fest.
TES has always been about action in a first/third person and exploration. The combat has nearly always come as an afterthought to the scope of the game. What is it you want from Bethesda? I would've liked to have seen some skill points too but you know what I got instead? Perks...and I'm happy about it.
People in hell want ice water, too, but that's not how hell works. I'm sure if Skyrim had the best of both worlds and somehow were able to make the greatest game ever by combining both styles in perfect gameplay everyone would be happy. However, that would take ages to develop and I'm quite happy with what they've done with Skyrim...they're taking small steps towards the future. Sure, some things have been dumbed down a bit but holy shit, man, it takes a long, long time to develop games of this magnitude. Sure, they could make a game with the deepest RPG elements with Bethesda-esque combat but something's got to give. You can have all of those things if you don't mind playing with Morrowind-style graphics in 2012. But if they did that then people would just bitch about how shitty the graphics are.
At first I was like, "Where the fuck is the Armorer/Acrobatics/various old skills from previous titles?" Then after playing a while and realizing how awesome it is not to have to carry around 50 fucking heavy armorer hammers with me to repair my shit or having to jump up and down everywhere like the fucking Lucky Charms leprechaun just to level up, I realized that I could actually sit back and ENJOY THE GAME. Holy shit, what a concept.
Sure, if you nerd-grind and spend all your money on leveling up enchanting and blacksmithing to level 100 by the time you're level 30, don't be surprised if you can wail on just about everything and kill it with one or two hits. Then comes the obligatory, "Don't do smithing and enchanting if you want a challenge because you'll just own everything" argument. Well sure you'll own everything if you spend three hours a day grinding materials and money to make stuff. Just like I said before, you can play the game how you want but you're kinda ruining it for yourself simply due to the game's design; the developers assumed that the majority of the people would want to explore and experience the game no matter what kind of armor and weapons they had, and could craft and enchant at their leisure when they had time or decided they wanted to level it up a bit after getting a foothold on Skyrim.
I hate to compare it to an MMO, but it's like all those people in WoW who would blow through the new expansion levels in like a day and a half, skipping all the cool stuff (when WoW had cool stuff) by just grinding dungeons over and over and over and over again just so they could get the max level and get to the end faster. It's not a race and I realize that one size doesn't fit all, but you're supposed to have FUN.
If you wanna play the numbers game, come play Eve Online with us.
Best. game. ever.
