I play on expert most of the time now, but I started on adept and played on that level for a long time and I still have one character (an archer) that I am playing on adept right now, so I may be able answer your question somewhat, although I do play my other three characters on expert now.

I die when I meet an enemy that is significantly tougher than me and either there is no room to run (cramped quarters) or I am exposed in the open against a faster opponent (snowy sabrecat) that I cannot outrun. Happens once every few hours of play and I have to reload.

I agree don't get me wrong I love Final Fantasy, but in TES I think it feels cheap for the enemies to have multitudes of health and then they also get a huge damage boost while your seemingly weakened.

I play on adept mostly just because I don't to throw my controller at the wall or hit my console.

Me neither. I wish they had multiple sliders so you could change the difficulty for all sorts of things, not just damage output. For instance, a difficulty slider that affected sneak detection would be good. Another one that affected lockpicking difficulty. One that altered pickpocket success. One that altered the amount of magicka needed to cast spells. One that affected only melee damage output. One that affected only spell damage output. One that affected bow damage output. One that affected damage done by opponents, so you could manipulate that seperately from your own damage output. Seems like if they had a whole screen deveoted to difficulty with multiple sliders that could be moved independantly, it would add a lot more costomization to the game. Too bad Todd Howard does not like spreadsheets.

I've answered your questions a couple of times. You just don't seem to care for or understand my reasons.

Inappropriate.

I personally prefer Adept, it feels realistic enough to me, as long as I don't increase my combat skills to much or quickly, I had to delete a high level character since I had it on master and still nothing was a challenge. I plan to not go too far into a combat related perk to quickly, but instead go into another beneficial tree.

LOL.

Anyways, I stick to normal. There is no chance of being lowering the difficulty, but I might bump it up to hard if DLC comes out

Adept
It allows me to pick my perks on the basis of what fits my character rather than mini-maxing and it also doesn't penalise me overmuch for having lousy reflexes and hand-eye coordination.

Adept.....Lvl 15 ranger, fine Longbow, fine leather. No smiting, no enchanting, only make potions I use. Never bought a single item from merchants, never use magic. No weapons other than bow, no perks in sneak. I die if I'm not careful,but always stay true to my RP.....it's allot of fun

Apprentice. I don't like dieing and I don't like my battles to drag on, even when fighting drag-ons. Gives me plenty of breathing room to make my characters the way I want to make them and the level scaling doesn't bother me as much.

Hmm.

Probably died at least a couple dozen times, mostly from dungeon bosses and dragons doing execution moves on me. Oh, and quite a bit from upper rank frost mages and frost-breathing blood dragons, before I found any frost resist items and got the element-blocking perk. The Gauldur Amulet bosses ran me over a few times, too. Especially in the final group fight.

Had a good number of close calls with other bosses where I needed to chug healing potions, as well.

Character was a Combat/Thief jack-of-all-trades. Primary combat skills, 1-hand / Block / Light Armor. Support from Restoration, Stealth, Archery, Smithing. Plus Lockpick, Speech, Alchemy, and that bit of enchanting you get from disenchanting stuff.
First skill to 100 was at level 48. Did about 2-1 health/stamina gains. I generally got Smithing to the point that I could make new style gear (Elven, Glass, etc) a few levels after it had started appearing as loot. Perks spread pretty widely - with the slow skill gains, there frequently weren't new perks to take on the "main" skills. Plus, the higher perks in some trees just didn't seem that interesting and/or perks in other skills seemed more useful. The average skill ended up with about 5-6 perks in it. Block had the most at 8.

edit: at level 52, my build looked http://skyrimcalculator.com/#75109 (had started to work on Enchanting at that point, finally)

Felt like I had challenging fights from level 10 straight through into the upper 40's.

Haven't tried expert, so I can't say how it compares.

I'v been thinking about switching up to master on a new character becos I can pulverize anything now... eventually i'd get to that point anyway
All of my gear tho has been smithed and enchanted to max status....

I play on adept.

I'm exactly the same, and also with every game i play.

For me it is more immersive not to die unless i fall from a cliff accidently.

I play on novice for this reason:

I never want to die in Skyrim, because if i am playing an RPG i sould never play the game again if i die, dead is dead there is no coming back. I do not find any setting on this game a challenge it is not Dark Souls. However i much prefer this game to any other because the environment, lore and gameplay is immense. I love it.

Master.

I would rather play on expert, but potions are far too common and poweful to make that balanced. Hopefully someone will produce a mod that nerfs potions somehow.

Adept level 1 - 20, expert 21 - 35 , master 36 and up.

My total hours played has got to be over 200 and that's all adept..

Now I'm on master because got sick of how stupidly easy it was.

On my conjuration mage (with a follower who can summon) its http://steamcommunity.com/id/LazyAltmer/screenshot/648750789806678920t, so I play on 2X Master difficulty, by using the mod Intense Difficulty. I also use PISE and Deadly Dragons (hard). Its about right, but I get one-shotted often.

That said, experimenting on new characters I usually start at Expert, and see how it goes from there. My melee characters never seem to do too well at Master.

I play on the easiest setting also. The reason is because just adding hit points or reducing my damage seems pointless. I'm gonna kill whatever i'm fighting regardless so why spend 5 minutes whacking away at it when I can do it in 5 seconds. The actual challenge doesn't go up with an increase in difficulty. Now if they added more mobs or different tactics with difficulty that would be a different matter but they don't. Increasing difficulty just seems like an unnecessary timesink.

Master, and I'm starting to believe my main save must be bugged or something because everything is still ridiculously easy. Already installed the Wars in Skyrim dark rainbow mod too. I play a heavy armor sword 'n board / dual-wield character with a failed attempt to branch into destruction (so weak compared to melee) at lvl 51 atm.

I play on Expert on my stealth archer who is lvl 30 atm which is surprisingly much more challenging.

I play on Adept. For me it's hard enough, I am not a seasoned gamer. I know how bad my hand eye coordination is at least as far as games are concerned. I guess I could play on an easier difficulty, I probably wouldn't die as often. But for me that's 1/2 the fun. The 1st 15 lvl's are nerve racking, I die alot. While I know their are way's to make my toon hardier at lower lvl's, that would end up making them more "God like" at the mid lvl's, and thats not what I want.

You know everyones play style is different, they play different. I really don't see what is so upsetting about someone elses difficulty lvl. If someone isn't telling the truth about the way they are playing it hurts no one but themseves.

Master, anything under it and Dragons become laughably easy. Plus the faster skillups are nice

is it pretty close to level 20 when difficulty changes?
any pc guys know for sure when?

New dragons appear every 10 levels, from level 10 - 50. Not sure about the rest, but I assume it's approximately the same. Playthroughs with 5 different characters seem to confirm this, because I notice things getting easier as I approach a threshold, then getting harder suddenly, then easier again.