Regarding Enchanting and how people complain that it essential for making Destruction useable, with all respect I want to ask what did you expect? Enchanting is the Mage crafting skill, and crafting skill are meant to make the archetype's other skills more useable. Without Smithing, one handed and two handed weapons are very underwhelming as well - even with all +20% weapon skills, an untempered weapon does very poor damage. Destruction works similarly - while without enchanting you can still do the damage with spells, you are highly limited in how much you can cast them.

I respectfully think that some people haven't really given Destruction magic a proper chance when they complain about it. Just like you can use another archetype's crafting skill to make melee more effective - e.g. by +weapon damage enchantments - but you are not really 'required' to in order to keep yourself competent in combat, you can use Alchemy in numerous ways to make Destruction far more potent. There are three invaluable potions if you feel your Destruction magic is underwhelming - Fortify Destruction, Weakness to Element, and Weakness to Magic. Now, I am speaking from experience here:- if you combine these three effects, without any restoration looping nonsense or whatnot, you can 1HKO a Draugr Deathlord with a single cast Incinerate. And I daresay it requires less perk points to do so than achieving the same thing with a melee weapon, not counting in sneak.

All it takes in my opinion is having an open mind to Destruction. I think it's good game design that Destruction magic has such potential but it's not so clearly obvious. Grabbing a 2H battleaxe and doing good damage with it is pretty intuitive, but as the lore suggests not everyone knows how to (or can be bothered to) unlock the potential of Destruction magic

Regarding Fire Storm, for example. Fire Storm actually is comprised of 3 different overlapping effects: 100pt fire damage in 100ft, 75pt fire damage in 65 ft, and 50pt damage in 25ft. This means that by itself, enemies within 25ft (about twice the size of a fireball explosion) will be taking 100+75+50= 225 damage. Add in two ranks of Augmented Flames, Aspect of Terror and a certain DB item and you're talking about 431 damage within 25ft and nearly 200 damage in a huge radius around you, plus burning damage and guaranteed stagger. It's not quite as underwhelming as people think to be honest, you can quite easily knock out rooms full of all enemies apart from the highest tier ones. e.g. Deathlord, Bandit Chief, etc. Obviously not something you will cast in every room in every dungeon ala Incinerate, but nevertheless a very potent option in your arsenal.

Granted, I think Blizzard is pretty rubbish - I think it's actually a coding error - but Lightning Storm is incredible as long as you set yourself up somewhere high up with good sight lines!