I made this account just so I could ask this because I can't seem to find the answer anywhere else.

I'd already had the 1.4 patch and had been playing it quite a bit, but I was still having freezes and lag worse than I should have so I decided I wanted to erase all the skyrim data from my PS3 and start with a fresh install to see if it helped any. After deleting it all when I booted up the game, it didn't give me the option for a patch or anything and just sent me into the game unpatched. I've tried resetting my PS3, making sure my network settings were okay (I'm logged into PSN and my internet connection is fine) and it still won't download the patch. I'd deleted everything and done a fresh install before with previous updates and it worked fine. Does anyone have a clue here?

I know this is more of a general PS3 query rather than specifically about Skyrim, but I'm wondering if something is wrong with my PS3 because of all the hard resets I've had to do. Anybody have advice?

That usually only happens when a patch is pulled from the net. But I don't think that happened. Last time something like that happened,it was with Dead Island when the patch prior to it's current was so bad it broke the game even more and the patch was taken down. I can't say that's the case with this patch though.

Pretty sure the patch data is it's own file in the game data utility - it's called 'Skyrim patches' or something. The install data itself isn't the same file as the patch.

Close, its called "Skyrim Update". It is a file by itself, not part of the game data file.

Yeah thats it.
To download the patches again OP you must first delete this file and not the 4GB game data file for Skyrim.