Part of the reason this game's crafting system seems unbalanced and awkward is that the player is required to use it. If you want an enchanted sword, you have to enchant it, yourself.

If you want to sharpen your Dwemer war axe, you have to sharpen it, yourself.

If you want to use powerful poisons and potions, you have to make them, yourself.

Alchemy
Alchemy, it seems, can get away with it. For one thing, alchemists do sell potions and poisons. Also, I tend not to use them much anyway and just go with whatever I find lying around. Which is another problem, but we won't get into that.

Smithing
Smithing is problematic. If you are playing a mage character, there's just no possible way to get good weapons or equipment other than to make it and refine it yourself. I don't agree with that. I should be able to take my kit to a skilled blacksmith and pay them some (huge) sum of money to make me a set of X. Or pay them some small fee to sharpen my blade. Or get fitted for armor. Or whatever.

Wait! How will the blacksmith of potentially unlimited skill know how much to sharpen (temper) the item? Well, you can have several things involved in that. First, your skill with the weapon/armor in question could come into play. Light armor skill of 75 means you can buy a better fit than skill of 20. Also, you can have the player level come into account. I'm less a fan of this option, but maybe. You also might just have certain blacksmith's have different skills and levels. Eorlund and his Skyforge, for instance, might be the only one who can do certain things.
(You could really expand on this, too, considering that there is the Lunar Forge as well, and previous games have Dwemer Forges. You could use unique forges in quests to unlock certain things that you could buy from certain blacksmiths.)

Lastly, you can just use money (and materials) as a barrier. For instance, smiths can't make you a full set of tempered daedric unless you bring them at least as much (perhaps more?) material as you would have needed in order to do it yourself. Plus you would need to pay them some huge sum, like 45,000 or something. I don't know exactly, but it's certainly possible to balance.

Enchanting
Enchanting is another one. As a warrior, why is there no possible way for me to get my weapon enchanted except to do it myself? That's purly nonsensical, especially in light of the following facts:

• Sergius Turrianus often says that enchanting services are one of the few things that keep the college in touch with the rest of Skyrim.
  
• Farengar Secret-Fire offers to give you basic lessons on how to enchant things. (implying he knows how to do it)
  
• There are skill trainers.
  
• Guards often ask you to enchant their equipment (if you are skilled). Which you can't. Sad face. "Sure guard, I'd love to!"

So anyway, all of this leaves me feeling a little empty. Actually, it leaves Skyrim feeling a little empty.

Agreed. I miss paying exorbitant sums to get stuff enchanted. It was Morrowind's ultimate money sink.

I've found TONS of pretty powerful enchanted weapons and armor.

The beauty of achemy, smithing and enchanting perks is that if you put the effort into it, you can one day do better yourself.

I would have loved to be able to commission NPCs to do things for me.

For role playing purposes, the option of having NPCs do a task that I don't think "fits" my character would be nice.

I liked this in Morrowind, it gave the game a nice money sink and would help if you were sticking to a certain character type, so being a Warrior you didnt have to go and learn/lvl up Enchanting...

The blacksmithing deal would be nice if you are a mage but want to take a warrior companion who you wish to outfit. You could just go to the local blacksmith and order up one set of whatever you needed and as long as you provide the materials and enough coin they would make it for you. That would have been very much preferrable to having to waste all my perk points on a trade that I'm not even using for myself.

This is something I find myself missing from Morrowind a lot as my character is a proficient smith but is absolutely lousy at enchanting. This is a particularly acute problem for me because a lot of the items I use must be crafted, and because I don't want to dedicate the time or the perks to fix my deficiency in enchanting I find myself wearing mostly unenchanted gear. The simplest solution to this would be to have vendors available to enchant my gear for me.

Morrowind's expansion also gave you the ability to order sets of armor provided you had the material and the money to do so. It was a nice feature -- and it added a much-needed money-sink to the game.

Honestly, I'm not sure why these aren't in the game to begin with.

I think there's two things which needs improving:
1. You should be able to hire smith/enchanter/alchemist to do your crafting.
2. When you craft something by yourself there should be somekind of minigame which affects on the result - not just selecting things on menuwindow and always getting a perfect success.

So many victims play this game.

I think the idea behind making you do it is so that those skills don't become useless, because we all know at the end of the game gold is a non-issue, so why waste all those perk points if at the end you can simply buy the stuff? it's like taking speech to make money, sure it's good at first, but once you get gold it becomes completely and utterly useless (except for the once in a lifetime skill checks, which most people can easily pass without speech anyway).

We are all victims of your vague post.

I agree. Have you ever played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance?

There's tons of these odd little "Pub Quests" that you can get.
The awesome thing is that you can pick up to three "clan members" (same as guild members) to go do the quests for you! Your clan members even earn XP while doing these quests without you. You also have to wait several in-game days for them to get back. Sometimes they fail though, but that's just realistic.

Kind of reminds me of Oblivion's Dunbarrow Cove upgrade where you could have your bandits "go plunder"... except these are actual quests that you can do also if you wanted to.

Ha! That's funny.

BUT I think I do agree with the thought that there should be NPC's capable of providing these services to you for a fee if the player character would not do these things themselves on their character.