The realy problem is that the difference in enemy power on master is astronomical. You meet a bandit in a cave who dies from one strike, but there's also bandits who need to be sliced up with over 20 hits.. Even out the difficulty and I'd be happy.

I think a hardcoe should be included in most games, I mean a lot of the tension in the gaming world right now is the shift towards more casual games I don't see why they can't just give the option for both hardcoe and Casual in-game options.

obviously many players just disagree. It's natural to have a say on how you feel about the gameplay. You seem irritated at a game that in my opinion is great. Stop playing is my only advice. Also, I feel torn between playing on Adept. I've tried to raise the diff but do not enjoy the game. I really do try but see no fun in it. I see the point in the earlier post that says the diff should be something other than a percentage of damage plus or minus towards Player or NPC. I seem to have just enough of a hard time on Adept. It really is in the Character design

Not if all they did was just crank up the damage enemies could absorb and deal out, then it just gets silly. If a simple bandit with an iron sword could one hit you in steel armour or whatever if just gets a bit laughable.

I'd love some sort if difficulty option that made health potions work very slowly or have a cool down period, or make dragons tougher and use more shouts, or something like that though.

Try playing dead is dead on master difficulty without using healing potions or restoration and put all your level ups into stamina, don't use fast travel and set the time scale to 5. And if you're really masochistic you can also limit your carry weight to 50 and don't use trainers or standing stones and force yourself to eat and sleep regularly.

Have you tried turning off the HUD? That one simple move increases the difficulty in a number of ways. Combat wise, by removing the "red dots", no HUD play forces you to look around for enemies and listen to sounds to determine where they might be. No crosshair makes aiming spells and arrows more challenging. No sneak crosshair means you really have to pay attention to sights and sounds in the game to determine whether you are being detected. Plus, no compass makes navigating the open world more interesting.

The whole no health/magicka/stamina bar is a bit of a pain and its stupid we cannot turn off the rest but keep these, but if its challenge you are after, having no health bar does increase the challenge of the game.

Now I agree that Bethesda bungled the options menu by having way too few options for how to fine tune the game with numeroud difficulty sliders that affected things like monster spawn level, sneak difficulty, hardcoe mode like FNV, etc., but at least they did give the option to turn off HUD. You should try it, if you haven't already.