Which one do you think is better? I am trying to decide which one to master in.
Please give reasons!

Comparing the two:
1. War Axes are slightly faster.
2. Maces have a slightly better chance to stagger your opponent.

Depends on the character I'm playing as to which I'll use.

Well with their perks maces ignore a portion of the targets armor and axes inflict extra bleed damage with each hit. So do you want more effective attacks on armored foes, or a little extra damage on all enemies but at the same time they would be less effective on armored. I would go with both mace for armored and then Axes/Swords for unarmored.

Actually if someone knows, I would like to know how much extra bleeding damage axes do, sources just say extra damage but how much? Also how much extra damage does a critical hit from swords and bows give, 1.5 or 2x?

I like the mace, as mentioned, I can stagger opponents much easier.

Before the game released, I went through all this in my head. The questions I asked myself were these: how often will fights last long enough for the bleeding effect to make a different, and how many foes will I fight who actually have armor? In Oblivion, the only foes who had armor were the various player race npcs, such as bandits and marauders. NO monsters did, though some of the daedra had that Reflect Damage power and Daedroth had a Shield power. Only the Dremora had armor, and that's because they wore armor. So I was concerned about the usefulness of those perks myself. In game, I've had the opportunity to try them out, and I really like the mace. I still don't know how many of the creature foes have armor for it to bypass, but it does stagger them more and it has higher damage ratings too. Maces > swords > axes in terms of damage rating, and also in terms of weight. I've found a direct correspondence between the weight of a weapon and the damage rating.

And a possibly odd side note: Dwarven smithing and Elven smithing perks both require a Smithing skill of 30, while Orc smithing requires a 50. Orc weaponry is better than steel but worse than either elf or dwarf. Elf is slightly better than dwarf.

2 handed warhammer seems OP to me atm, I occasionally 1 shot opponents with it.

The 2 handed animations with it are superb as well.

Looking at the smelting station, Dwarven stuff seems to have the advantage that it's a lot easier to get the right ingots. You can melt down any Dwemer scrap you find to get it.

I've been asking myself this same question. I haven't leveled enough or gotten enough one-handed perks to really worry about specialization yet, but I'm quickly approaching the point where I'll need to do so. I've always thought that TES' combat animations are better suited for hafted weapons like maces and axes, so I probably won't be using swords. I then came to the same line of reasoning that Quillan is using - how often will the respective perks for maces and war axes be useful?

I will probably go with war axes for a few reasons. The first is that I feel the perk(s) for war axes has a more "all-around" factor than the perk(s) for maces. From what I've seen so far, it seems that trolls, giants, dragons, dragon priests, spriggans, sabre cats, atronachs, etc will be the toughest enemies in the game, which makes the armor bypass much less useful. The second reason would be that some of the higher-level war axes are very aesthetically pleasing - the Daedric war axe, in particular, looks pretty sweet. The last reason is that, from a role-playing perspective, an axe would be a more useful thing for an adventurer to carry. A handheld axe can be a versatile tool, whereas a mace is basically just a fancy club.

Speaking of axes, does anyone have any information on how exactly "bleeding damage" works? The game doesn't elaborate on this topic, and what I've read so far on the internet seems quite ambiguous. Will we have to wait for the construction kit to find out the specifics?

Not sure if I'm allowed to post links here? But I found a short thread on another site that seems to indicate that bone breaker works on all enemies and not just those in actual armor. Suggesting that even wolves, for example, have some sort of natural "armor" or damage reduction. Further confirmation would be nice.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=26373935

How do swords compare with the +crit chance?