As a veteran of Oblivion and Morrowind getting ready to start a new character, I find myself being a little gun-shy about some of the character-breaking problems of the past.

Do skills like Alchemy and Smithing still screw up the leveling curve the way they did in Morrowind and Oblivion? IE, if you stop and make yourself a bunch of potions at low level, will you end up jumping five levels and getting your rear handed to you because you still have low level fighting skills? Is it enough of an issue that it is necessary to actively avoid using Alchemy like in vanilla Oblivion?

There's almost no level scaling in the game. So you're not going to have that problem.

Alchemy and speech level really slow. Smithing and enchanting go faster but then again, you don't mass produce those things unless you are trying to skill that.

Right, higher level is good. The levels are more like in Gothic games which is a good thing IMHO.

Awesome, thanks for the input. It'll be nice to actually be able to build for a character concept rather than for the mechanics.