Those are not little things and worthy of far more than a dismissive one liner. Attributes allowed huge variety in character creation and development, as did spell making. By removing those things dozens of options and a huge amount of depth were removed.

Yes, Oblivion svcked in many ways, but they were all fixable. Skyrim out of the box is no doubt better, but there is less that I can do with it.

Erm... HoMM is practically what you described there and it's awesome, so your example is simply silly.

OT:
Making something more simple isn't that big of a problem when it removes some unnecessary things which were only excess.
In that case, it's actually a good thing!
It becomes a bad thing when developers overdo with it only to make the game appeal to simple-minded masses and it becomes a dumb down (something Skyrim suffers greatly from, especially lycanthropy - all you fan-boys/girls can try to deny this, but it's true, period).
Video games are becoming shallow and dumb without any challenge in them, while game just tells you how awesome and special you are.
Honestly, supporters of dumbed down video games are equivalent to Twilight fans.

hey man, thats [snip] up.

to superman.

There is a tremendous amount of flaming being traded in here, this thread will remain locked.

It's fine to have criticisms or differences of opinion, but these need to be expressed civilly and constructively.