Am I the only one who likes Skyrim's textures? They look like crap when you stare directly at them up close, but any time you're moving and see them at an angle or from a distance (like ground textures, rock textures) they look surprisingly good for how large the game is and how small the files are. I haven't downloaded that "Skyrim HD" texture pack yet because the screenshots honestly don't look much better than how the default game looks while moving (but you can sure nitpick it in the screenshots). It's not worth the extra space for me, unlike say QTP3 for Oblivion which made everything look so much better. I'm waiting for something like that.
I've changed water textures, foliage textures, and cloud textures, though, and the lighting.
Skyrim did add shadows to all objects, and that whole dynamic snow thing, and basic land deformation with dragon crashes, and fire spells leaving flames behind. I don't know if those are the result of the engine changes or not. Seems you forgot about most of the positives in your rant.
EDIT: I vote that we ignore Universe because he doesn't seem to know what's going on in his own thread anymore.
What dynamic snow are you referring to? You mean how sometimes it snows and sometimes it doesn't? Oblivion had that too, except with rain.
In all honesty, I haven't even noticed the shadows on other objects. I'd much rather have good shadows on most things than crappy shadows on everything.
In terms of the land deformation, that's something that I've never noticed. It's probably nice, but again, I can't really think of a situation where either I've noticed it or when Oblivion could have used it.
Fire spells leaving behind fire is a nice effect, but again, isn't something that I notice that much in-game. I don't stop and say, "Damn! That's some nice looking fire!" (quite the opposite; the fire is also pretty lackluster).
Most of the textures do look fine from a distance, but Oblivion's also looked fine from a distance. I just don't understand why, on a game released 6 years later, they would decide to make textures look so much worse. The game is roughly the same (filewise) as Oblivion, and I've found that Oblivion had much more content.