I am not sure if this topic has been brought up or not but, is there any way that there can be an update as to where you can smelt down a piece of armor for the materials? Because you can do it for enchanting you can disenchant.

Oh right I had this conversation before with a buddy of mine. The only way you can do anything similar to this is by melting down Dwemer metals. I'd love you be able to melt down a weapon but Daedric, for instance, would be complicated because how can you get a Daedra heart back?

You can't smelt anything but mined ores, or Dwemer metal objects.

IF you were to be able to "melt" down all weapons and armor to get back materials, I would expect to only get back the metal. The deadric weapons for example use the daedra heart to basically enchant the weapon with a daedric soul. That's why they are so powerful. But you wouldn't expect to get a daedra heart out of a smelter would ya?? I certainly wouldn't. And other materials, such as leather and leather strips, would just burn off as well. So, logically, if you melt something down, you shouldn't expect to get anything back but the metal.

IF you want to get everything back you'd need something more like the enchanters table, so you could use magic to take the items apart.

It's not like Ore or raw materials are that hard to find in this game. If you have no money, visit a few mines, kill a few animals and you will have all that you need.

Now, of course, if you are grinding Smithing up, then raw materials can be more of a challenge to procure enough, but it still can be done.

Oh heavens yes. My main char has been Blacksmith 100 forever, and she probably has 500 misc. ingots and about as much un-smelted ore laying around the house in Breezehome, unneeded. I only stop for veins of gold or ebony, anymore. And I don't need those, it's just the idea of it I may have bought a couple moonstone or ebony ingots from vendors early on, when I found a new item to upgrade and didn't have the needed ore, but not very often.

I didn't know you could smelt Dwemer metal. 200+ hours and there's still surprises. Amazing. Thank you Beth.

Smithing was done so poorly -.-

Smithing is amazing. Thank you Beth.

I'd love to see some logical and objective reasoning behind such a statement.

It's unlikely for Bethesda to add it in an update as it would unbalance the system by giving you even more ingots than you already get.

With mods you can smelt weapons and armor. At least http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=4429 mod I use does it, and makes ingots rarer or removes them entirely from vendors to balance it. It makes smithing much more interesting.
Edit: In this mod you've to buy schematics before you can smelt anything or build anything.

Why was it done poorly? It has a few flaws, yes, but it's still nice to have in the game, adds a lot to role-playing.

Smithing should not have been a skill in my opinion it should have only been able to create armor and different variants of the same armor with using dyes to change the colors.

It unbalances the game between characters that smith and characters that do not. Making it an almost required skill for the higher difficulties. Weapons and armor should not have been able to be upgraded since this is the major problem.

Biggest reason?

Smithing is the only crafting skill that does not require some sort of recipe. None.

By simply picking a Perk you automatically know how to craft and upgrade every single type of armor and weapon in that Perk level.

There's no testing like in Alchemy.

There's no reverse engineering like in Enchanting.

There's nothing that gives it much achievement or meaning.

And it adds a lot of role-playing?

My single point above completely negates any "strength" it pretends to add to RP value.

This puts into exactly the same category as Speechcraft.

Why not try lorecraft.

Oh, I think upgrading weapons and armor should have been the main part of smithing, myself. As long as it had been sensibly limited, to where you could upgrade the stuff you found maybe 25-50%, somewhere in that realm. But with all the +smithing gear and potions and exploits and related perks they put into Skyrim, you can take a 60-damage sword and easily upgrade it to over 500-1000 damage. Far more, if you want to really work it. That was just silly of them. When a crafting skill can do that, it is truly broken.

I agree and also being able to find these upgraded items "more rare" and more high end loot. And in my opinion you shouldnt be able to upgrade daedric artifacts the base stats should be higher then regular weapons.