I hate Skyrim, so I can try and field this one.
Skyrim at it's core feels like the epitome of a Triple A game; strip out some depth and add some flashing lights and start hyping up the 'NEXT ELDER SCROLLS GAME! THE RPG YOU PLAY HOW YOU WANT TO PLAY!'
I also just recently woke up so my thoughts may be muddled.
There's nothing I really like about the game, between the floaty combat where anything outside of stealth 'n' bows feels pointless, the writing is abysmal, I can't even really remember a quest/questline I like. The Thieves' Guild was promising, then it turned into 'MUH NIGHTINGALES: The Dungeon Crawl', while the Dark Brotherhood felt like it was going to try and be Oblivion's plotline for them but one-up it.
Daedric Quests still felt by the numbers except for maybe Sheogorath's and... uh... Sanguinius? Even then, the latter was mostly for the award.
Even exploring isn't that fun; either draugr dungeons or bandit dungeons, and maybe if you want something a bit more interesting FALMER. To tie back into Quests Radiant Quests will shove you into caves and such. It really felt like now that they had 'infinite quests' they could skimp out on the writing and such because they had the BETHESDA SANDBOX downpat.
Towns felt lifeless and more importantly empty, especially when you go to the capital and it's like 16 buildings and some inhabitants thrown in. This comes in really hard with the Civil War Questline, as these are boring little places and now I have to help people I don't care about fighting for reasons poorly utilised... it all just comes together.
"But what about the dragons?"
Ah yes, 'The Legend of Screaming Mimi and her Asgard Vacation'. (... I also don't think playing as a Nebelwerfer or a Calliope would help either)
The shouts felt... very basic. I never used them to great effect, or it never felt that way. Comes back to to floaty pointless combat system. Sure, the Poster Child Shout causes knockdown, but you're not gonna get much damage output out because the enemies scale with you-
OH YEAH, THE SCALING!
Boy oh boy this was shit. Pretty sure they also pulled this crap in Oblivion and it came back with a fucking vengeance. This is really exacerbated by that goddamn leveling system, the origin of 'PERKS ARE A GOOD LEVELING SYSTEM RIGHT GUYS?' Bethesda got in their damn head.
It didn't feel progression.
Like, in Fallout and such you did get perks, sure, but they usually weren't just a percentile increase, that was usually handled by the Skill points or attributes. Skill points in this solely seemed to work as an unlock gate. Perks that would either just unlock automatically in other games or ones that should probably just be unlocked in the first place. So in the end they give such a small increase that it doesn't get you anywhere.
... Unless you level things that aren't combat. Good luck getting anywhere without it champerino, cos them Draugr DeathGods are gonna stomp you into paste.
You can also see this occur in Fallout 4. The infinite quests, just 'splore, don't worry about the writing, sure the combat's improve but better combat's not what I play Fallout for.
Neither is Settlement Building.
Going off track. But in regards to Fallout 4, it admittedly did intensify the dislike towards Skyrim for being a progenitor to the product that is Fallout 4.
But that doesn't matter, Skyrim is it's own smelly rotten basket of eggs and I can judge it on 'Being Skyrim' alone.
Throwing aside the butt-fuckingly retarded argument of 'OH WELL AS LONG AS YOU CAN MOD IT TO BE GOOD', a practise which I'm sure is what lead us to where we are now, I modded this to the point almost rivaling my New Vegas, a verifiable lore friendly monster that if I so much move one piece it all comes tumbling down and I have no idea how to rebuild it, and I just know there's some lost mods in there.
Just a bit over a year ago, I went on a quest to mod Skyrim enough that I could find some enjoyment in it, and I failed.
I am no slouch to modding these games, I have the patience of a bear in a coma, I spent days getting this game modded. Fix the combat, fix the magic, the stealth, add in some quests, breathe life into towns, remove scaling, change the leveling, deepen mechanics, fix bugs, add companions and such, add new things without it loking like a nightmare, gussy it up a bit...
It didn't work. Sure, while it did clean up some of my complaints, it still was Skyrim, that stank just permeates all through it. Even with improved combat it still didn't feel good, even with better magic it still felt like the same old magic.
I changed it extensively and it didn't feel much different.
That's when I gave up on attempting to see why people love it. I cannot do it. I played it even on the PS3 back at launch and the only reason I did so was because I was stuck with friends for a week and friends can make the worst game enjoyable. I even managed to push through the stupid PS3 gradual slowdown bug.
So in short: I hate Skyrim.
I hate what it was, what it is, and everything that it has lead to. It's a game that should have never been the darling of so many people and one that has so many versions. It is a shallow, cut down skeleton of a game devoid of any heart or... anything.
Not even mods could fix it, the darlings of PC gaming.
Most of all I'm sad, because Skyrim is the biggest example for me of the games industry on it's rush downhill.
Yet so many people were fine with it.