I do agree that there is a limit to how many attributes you can make a player manage before it becomes totally burdensome, and I know from Daggerfall that an overly complicated character creation process can turn off players from enjoying the game, but I think there's some middleground to be had here.

I think Oblivion's leveling system was flawed (in that it punished you for only leveling major/minor skills by not multiplying your attribute levels much) but I still like the way different types of characters feel different to play and I think that's an important part of the RPG experience that Skyrim sometimes doesn't fulfill.

Then again, the natural creation and leveling process in Skyrim was really simple and doesn't ruin the immersion of the game by forcing you to think about "have I leveled this skill enough to get that 5x boost to endurance by the time I level up?".

I think a nice middleground would be to make all the attribute adjustments happen behind the scenes. A stealthy thief character who wears light armor will naturally learn to jump higher and run faster over time, while a heavy-armor wearing warrior will naturally build up high endurance and strength from carrying such heavy equipment (meaning low speed at first but a gradual increase over time as your strength improves). Magic users will become more intelligent from practicing magic, and you'll build up your willpower (resistance to magic) from enduring magic attacks. Perhaps these attributes will decrease over time as they're not being used, or when complementary attributes level up. I'm just making shit up, here, but putting it behind the scenes (kind of like Pokemon's IV/EV stats) might fix all characters feeling the same to play. This lets players who don't care about attributes ignore them, but it lets those of us who like this sort of thing have more fun building different kinds of character classes.

That way, you aren't presented with the arbitrary "Health, magic or stamina +10" choice at each level up, but you'll just pick a perk.

Simplicity is nice but when it gets in the way of you making the kind of character you want to make, it takes me out of the experience (and that's why, although I still loved Skyrim, I think it's worse than Oblivion and Morrowind were).

And I guess my only other gripe with the system in Skyrim is that any character is able to do any faction questline. Your 2handed warrior who's never cast a spell in his life shouldn't be able to become the archmage of Winterhold. In Morrowind, you had to have skills relevant to your guild at a certain level to get promoted (e.g. to become archmage of the Mages Guild, you had to have one magic skill at 90 and two others at 35).

It's the sort of jack-of-all-trades thing about Skyrim that kind of ruins it for me. It makes it feel like the world is designed just for you, where in previous games you felt like just another person in the world trying to survive.