You're really not missing much.

Horrible story, horrible voice acting, mediocre combat, uninteresting world, copy pasted dungeons, and not much quest variety.

People love it so much because it's also a sandbox so you can do whatever in whatever order you want usually and if not then you can most likely mod it.

Be prepared to fall down a rabbit hole of mods and possibly spend hours upon hours of picking and choosing mods.

But, I play RPGs mainly for the story so I can usually forgive other elements not being up to snuff as long as it's engrossing enough to get me immersed into the world.

Unfortunately, Skyrim completely falls flat on its face in that department for me and it's buggy as sin to boot so be prepared for immersion breaking bugs to happen with alarming frequency.