The primary problem that quests seem to have is resulting to either fetching an item or killing an enemy. What goals would you have to achieve in a game without any dressup whatsoever? Truly, if you removed all dress-up from most open-ended rpgs you would find only kill or fetch quests. In the real world as well things can be repetitive. Any job in the real world could be called a series of fetch and/or manufacture tasks. Manufacture a burger, move things from point a to b, etc. What brand of actions could you possibly perform to move beyond this dead simple repetition of fetching or killing in these games?

I think of them as goals, and I've come up with some ideas for goals that cover most areas. I express them in simple, one-word descriptions. You can think of goals they may provide from your own imagination.

Some Core principles that may provide goals or actions for players to do, these are what you see when you strip away all decoration:

-stay alive
-entrap a target or group (note this does not mean you're trapping it to bring it to someone, just the entrapment alone then you walk away)
-build a structure, item, or train a skill
-create effective resource gathering (such as whole supply lines, or repetitive fetch-questing to do it yourself)
-kill a target
-travel to a point within allotted time
-find something or anolyze many things as a whole (like entrapment, this is about the finding itself and not about being part of a fetch quest)
-convince others to ally with you
-make sudden, rapid changes. perhaps even comedic.

these are just ideas I thought of. There could be many more or alterations to these.

Wouldn't you have a wonderful rpg world with simply builders, fighters, rulers, etc. all consisting of players and taking care of their own business? All the variety, freedom, skill, and intelligence you could want. This could be terrifying, so perhaps transitioning people from more controlled worlds to more free ones gradually? Then again, doesn't this sound like raising a child who then grows up in the real world? Parental control followed progressing to freedom. Things to consider.

Everything is a plot coupon.

the primary problem with quests isnt them being dressed-up fetch quests, its them wearing such ragged and ugly dresses. a properly presented fetch quest could be the most tense and dramatic moment of the game.

at any rate, your ideas seems paradoxically right up the alley of a TES game, but something that will never properly be implemented in it. that kind of diversity in non-combat objectives seems perfect for an open-world RPG where a lot of people like to play non or reluctantly violent characters, but frankly... bethesda is not the company to do it. they have a hard enough time keeping their pretty worlds stable with all the murder and magical craziness you can take part in, which is probably why their quests svck to begin with.

id like something akin to resource-gathering, god knows id like to see how the rest of the universe gets grand soul gems without the godlike power needed to fill it. a lot of that other stuff would add a whole new layer of gameplay, which while of course not bad, i dont think can really be done given everything else they have to work on.

realistically, i think they should work on the radiant quest system. give them some purpose, make them required to progress in guilds, make some bounty hunter quests and what not. as is the nature of TES, quests need to stop being bethesda's... less than quality attempt at storytelling and be more of an avenue for players to make their own stories. put a bounty quest in a dungeon so they fight the inhabitants and you arrive to find that the technically he is already dead, but now you have kill his corpse and the necromancer controlling it. stuff like that... basically the kind of stuff we play TES games for.