It's like this. You can do a heavy roleplay version of the game, only skills and equipment that make sense for that character, no fast travel except carriages, no crafting exploits, no or limited HUD, not use active markers on the map, no factions or quests that aren't appropriate for your character and no reloading, whatever the circumstances apart from bugs and crashes. OR IF YOU WANT, you can go casual action, exploit whatever the hell you like, and enjoy the sights and the world and defeating enemies, join all the factions, reload to get all the treasure and not miss a single ounce of content. The choice is given to you, it's yours. I never reload, not even to save my sorely missed dogs, but if someone else wants to play an action game 'to win' and miss out on all that lovely role-playing immersiveness because they just have to pass that intimidation check or crack that lock, that is up to them, no skin off my nose.
Yes, thats fine. I see that this is where we are heading with games. Sure, as long as you base lockpicking etc on RNG it might be hard to do something about it. I just don't think that we should strive to have exploit friendly games, i don't see how breaking a game is a good thing. I'm not saying that Skyrim isn't great because you can do w/e you feel like it it - be it role play, or powergaming. But if you are not the roleplay type then I would assume that you like a challange - which you don't really get from exploiting. Smart exploiting maybe, I used to enjoy that in older games - simply because they games were so hard and non userfriendly anyways - that if you managed to find a way to give you an advantage it actually added to the fun.
Spaming quickload isn't doesn't take alot theorycrafting however o.o
You also gotta know that alot of people playing this game are used to how TES games used to be, sure you could exploit the hell out of them as well - but at least they had a steep learning curve. If you wanna streamline things in newer games to make them more userfriendly so that they don't require you to bring up your calculator,pen and paper every time you are making a character. Then at least make use of modern technology to make other parts of the game more interesting and interactive - combat, pick pocket, lock picking etc.
Using ancient ways to design games like RNG doesn't work to well if you remove what made the series deep in the first plays, namely theorycrafting and min/maxing. Basicly they removed things from the series but didn't replace it with anything else, except for better graphics.
Thats just the way I see it.