Utterly Mad

That's why I can't really bring myself to enjoy Bethesda's newer stuff without mods.  There's a severe lack of compelling content that would make me want to overlook the glaring mechanical flaws their games have.  Not enough characters that aren't cardboard cutouts beyond the select chosen few that reoccur in pretty much every game.  Not enough interesting actual choices or alternate solutions in their questlines that doesn't invariably devolve into some kind of combat.  There certainly are standouts such as the Thieves' Guild in Oblivion, but all these do is make it so much more obvious to me how much the rest of the content in the game is unsatisfying filler. 

This is the same reason I couldn't keep playing Star Wars: The Old Republic.  The stark contrast between the interesting personal storylines each class has and all of the garbage filler that every MMO always contains put me on this roller coaster experience where I'm alternating between being totally involved and slogging through uninteresting crap and wishing I was playing something else. 

The ****ing quest markers in their post-Morrowind titles is also a big contributor of this, removing much of the element of personal discovery that made older RPGs so great.  Turning quest markers off doesn't help because in most cases they don't have enough details that make it possible to actually navigate to quest objectives without them. 

Skyrim was the post-Morrowind game of theirs that I actually played for a significant length of time without hating my life or feeling compelled to mod the hell out of it, and for that, I give it props, even if in hindsight it also was loaded with flaws and suffered from oversimplification.