I agree one hundred percent, oblivion was too clean cut for me, it was ok, but way too clean, skyrim is more gritty, and gritty is better imo.

Morrowind is a top-notch hack-and-slash, but Skyrim may outshine it in old-fashioned role playing. Morrowind poses problems to you in the form of, "How will you use your skills and spells to handle this problem?" Skyrim, on the other hand, poses problems in the more old-fashioned RPG sense: "How will you handle this situation?" You can improvise solutions that don't depend on your simply picking from a list of skills and spells, though skills and spells are also available. You can use the environment in a variety of ways to improvise weapons for defeating enemies. You can take advantage ot the environment to distract enemies, or to help you sneak past them. Skyrim gives you more freedom to think as a role player, because lets you think of solutions an unskilled character might try. Morrowind mostly constrains you to the skills and spells, so it is a bit more like a strategy game where you manage units that do nothing outside their designated abilities.

Morrowind has a greater quantity and variety of skills and spells, but seems to have a smaller variety in kinds of solutions. In Morrowind, you wield a damaging spell or a damaging weapon. That's about it for combat. In Skyrim, you can wield a damaging spell or a damaging weapon too, and you can also improvise weapons, working the environment like a puzzle.

I am not going to try ranking these games. Playing them is easier, and more fun.

After 200+ hours of skyrim I can say I like it more than Oblivion. They fixed a lot of issues oblivion had like psychic guards, combat, dungeons(variation), ect. If skyrim had spellcrafting, a good ui (like skyUI or QD), weapon and armor upkeep, guild ranks, more oblivion like quest log (more morrowind like quest log), fame and infamy ect the game would be as perfect as it could be.