I had just purchased Breezehome, and was looking forward to all the
gleaming treasures that I'd put upon its shelves. I see a stack of plates
on a shelf and go to push each one into the corner, and as soon as I
grab, POW, the whole stack goes flying off the shelf as the plate auto-
centers itself on my cursor. In Oblivion, an object's grab-point was
wherever your crosshair sat on the object, allowing for an object to be
delicately nudged into place or turned to a certain angle. As it stands,
even minor adjustments to an object involve scraping it against some-
thing static in the hopes that it flips the direction you wanted it to.

Then there's the fact that everything I hand-place winds up on the floor
when I next enter the house, but I'd be digressing with that subject.

Decorating seems completely out in this game, there are so many problems like the one you mentioned, and also my house seems to randomly explode when I'm out questing, I can't trust anything to be placed, I have to put all my items in chests now.

It was impossible to decorate in Oblivion, too.

So restoring Oblivion's grabbing system won't do a damn thing.

Where was it impossible to decorate in Oblivion? I decorated each of my character′s houses ingame, and despite having to be a bit careful not to knock things over, it worked perfectly well.

The more or less non existing decorating possibility in Skyrim is very disappointing for me, but I doubt that that could be changed.

Fallout decorating worked just fine.

I concur, I had no problems keeping a house well-decked, even when in my first plays of Oblivion on the 360. With mods, I'm able to lock things where I put them so that the physics won't bug-out on them, but even that didn't happen too often for me. In Skyrim, I can barely get anything placed properly to begin with. I can only hope mods will come soon that'll provide me the house-decorating power that I crave.