So in Daggerfall and Morrowind, you join a guild. You do quests for that guild. You, by raising your skills and gathering reputation, are advanced through the guild until you eventually can take over it.
In Oblivion and Skyrim 'joining a guild' is embarking on an epic quest that sets out to kill the guild leader as fast as possible so you can become Arch-Mage despite being Conan The Barbarian and never using magic.

So, anybody else miss the Daggerfall and Morrowind way of doing it? I mean, I'm fine with some grand overarching questline but even in Skyrim it feels too...forced. The Dark Brotherhood are basically the only guild in either game that felt like they did it right, by having an overarching plotline but requiring you to step outside of it and do other jobs to prove yourself and advance. The Mage's Guild/College of Winterhold and The Fighter's Guild/Companions both seem to get swept up in their own plots to the point that it feels less like you've joined an organisation and more like you've just joined a particularly long quest that you can forget about when it's done. Heck, in The Thieves Guild whilst you can do random quests the plot doesn't stop moving to the end of the questline so I never felt like you can actually stop and do them.

What? Rob that place? But other dude told me to go here and it seems important! I'll just do that first! *later* Okay, finished. Here's your gem and I'll just be off and, take a break, do some more quests and oh...you want me to do something else? Fine, I'll go do that now.

I got to thinking, in Daggerfall you'd do random quests with the odd "scripted" quest in the mix. So...Skyrim has it's "Radiant Story" system which basically recreates a somewhat simple "random quest" system. And you can script quests to add to the mix as well. So why not take advantage of this, and add a reputation system to the existing guilds? Make it so the Thieves Guild and Companions won't give you quests after each "plot point" until you've done a few of the Radiant jobs. The College of Winterhold doesn't seem to have as many random quests from what I saw of my play through, so a whole system may need adding into it.

Of course I have other issues with the Companions and Winterhold: Winterhold needs more people (What kind of College has more teachers than students?) and the Companions...the Companions whole "become a werewolf?" "I don't wanna!" "THOU MUST!" "Okay then" is just baaaaad (I'm not even sure if the Companions one can be fixed...probably be less effort to build a whole new small Fighter's Guild xD).

So what do you think would go into a mod to improve the guilds?