With this character I havent triggered the dragons, or taken any followers (except for leading the Riften housecarl to Boethiah).

Awesome.

I like the NO RANDOM DRAGONS model myself. With my second character / play through I avoided the main quest until Balgruf insisted I had to attend to the Dragon Issue at the Watchtower during the Civil War questline. So turned in dragonstone, went to Watchtower and did the quest. Figuring, well at least I can activate some shouts now, visited greybeards also. While finishing up the civil war quests (Imperial), I had two random attacks, both occuring when I arrived at a Legionaire camp. Afterwards not a single random spawn. I think this is because I stopped the main quest prior to visiting Kyesgrovew/ Delphine. This is where one learns tha Alduin is resurrecting his kin.

Anyway, its nice to discover dragons at their lairs / word walls, while traveling, you usually see them soaring around, but even better not to have them dropped on you the moment you pop out of a dungeon or a fast travel. You won't gain enough souls to activate every word, but enough to get a nice selection of the best ones.

I've used this game approach on 3 characters now with consistant results, no random dragon spawns once the the civil war is concluded. But dragons and their souls are available still to cash in on some of those words you learn....

I'm right there with ya, TC. I absolutely despise all of this dragon garbage as it really clashes with my vampire RP. I even manually remove shouts I learn by accident (since you learn them automatically on approach... another great idea, Bethesda). As for followers eh, I don't really see the harm in 'em. I use a mod that enables me to tell them to chill out for a while, sit down and relax instead of standing like statues for hours on end.

But yeah, I haven't triggered dragons or done any of the main quests for months and I'm much more satisfied because of it.

the dragons start to be annoying in the later levels because you have so many things to do, and then a dragon appears at the wrong time.
What i did was to console the dragon, disable and markfordelete. I just assume that the dragon isnt there and no one got hurt. Works everytime.
But as a result, since the dragon wasnt killed, u dont get souls. Therefore, i dont haev any shouts, which is FINE.

Same here, dragons are just an annoyance. Jarl of Whiterun wants to talk about dragons? I'm out of the door in a split second.
Also, no followers, because the AI is made of weak sauce.

What I did additionally is to ditch the horse. The general idea of having horses is nice, but as with followers they're beyond useless. Sure, their AR (artificial retardness) can be improved with mods, but I strongly recommend to give it a try.

Ban fast traveling on top of that and you'll enjoy the beautiful land of Skyrim much more! In fact, I've been enjoying it so much since... I dedicated a http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/imageshare/image.php?id=59376 to it

I use a horse to get around because fast traveling everywhere is gross but typical walking speed is slowpoke. Horses themselves are cute but they die real easy. Shadowmere, though, s/he's my favorite. <3

I'm using the "You Are Not The DragonBorn" mod - it's great.

Slowpoke? As a low level char in heavy armor maybe.
I can sprint way longer than any horse can. Really, try it. Might look slow first, but running from Solitude to Riften doesn't take as long as you might think.

Then, interacting with NPCs is not possible on a horse. Same with harvesting plants. Unmount, do something, and finally mount again all the time isn't just annoying, it also breaks the flow.

Well yeah, there's sprinting, but still prefer horses. Like just plain sprinting, they can't gallop at full speed for very long, but when they can, it makes the trip way shorter.

And yeah, I just ignore NPCs unless I know I can jaw with them. Most plants are so abundant in certain holds that I don't really find it necessary to collect /all/ of them.

Horses svck.
I do wish there was a way to increase foot speed a bit.
I used to love the high speed and athletics in OB.
Plodding along svcks, even in no armor.