I'm not a graphics [censored]. I couldn't care less about 'purdy' animations. Hell, Morrowind had some nice animations for its time. And in Morrow SC, all of the 'purdy' aesthetics showed up.

You could play as a pure mage in any other vanilla ES, And with SC, an even more specialized one. So your last sentence makes even less sense than your first.

What?
Sorry, but I prefer a good quality cake with so-so icing over a stale brick with the best icing in the world.
Graphics largely do not matter.
Secondly, there has never been a less varied, interesting and utalitarian magic system in any TES game but for Skyrim.
You simply can do a lot less, about 1% or so of what previously was available.
We used to have the ability to use up to seven effects in a single spell, of any magnitude and duration we desired, on touch, on target, aoa on target and on self, or any combination thereof.
Now we have 85 spells period.

The quest mechanics are made for dumb people. Instead of being given information and being required to use that information to find your quest location and what you need to do do from NPCs it just shows up in your journal and for the location you just follow the arrow like a mindless robot. Better if you needed to talk to people, sometimes several people to get the name of the location and they would tell you it's S.W. of Whiterun and East of a river or whatever. Then you would have to actually spend time exploring and look for it. And the journal should have more complete quest information. Who gave the quest (Name and role ie Shopkeeper Gro-Urgal). Where they gave it (Town and house in the town). What they wanted you to do. Why they wanted you to do it.

Do you think it wasn't?

The gutting of magic was a deliberate design choice because of people complaining about magic being "overpowered" and "redundant" in Oblivion and Morrowind. Many former spell effects were put into the game (like unlock and spell absorption) as powers, but not made available for regular usage. The only logical reason they would spend time programming spells into the game only to prevent it's regular usage would be to address the criticisms Oblivion and Morrowind had.

Since magic was ruined by these actions and it was a deliberate design choice, it really was their goal to ruin magic. (Although I doubt they would describe it like that )

I just dont know how you (Todd and Co.) could say "magic back in magic", yet give us this [censored]. Obviously PR is PR, but they managed to ruin all of magic, not just "no spell creation". I did not expect that. I mean, I knew magic would be ruined with no SC, but not this ruined.

The good news is people are complaining about how lame magic is in Skyrim. This gives me some hope that TES VI will have spell creation.

...Or they will cut magic out entirely.

Pretty much. Pre and post release views and opinions on Skyrim magic and lack of SC are night and day. If only this many people voiced out pre release, maybe they would have at least considered not fubaring magic.

Post limit.