In terms of game design skyrim has a couple of problems.

1) It is too easy for those who are extremely capable.
2) There is no way for lower levels to avoid the real hard areas.
3) There are no consequences for dying over and over until you eventually beat what ever it is that you are fighting.

My solutions are:

1) Create 3 reagions around Skyrim that are different levels of difficulty with better rewards where it is harder.

2) Adopt a Guild Wars style of reducing stats when you die and come back to fight and killing bosses/tough guys or sleeping in town for a while restores your stats. So after dying 4 or 5 times you could be down at 10% of normal magica, health and stamina. Returning would see

doesn't this just make the game more of a pain in the butt?

Leveling is probably the smallest if not a nonexistent issue Skyrim has.

And yea, what that guy said ^

Sounds like you want to play Dark Souls.

No.

Always no.

Second that.

There are regions where combat is more difficult from the start. Try heading to Markarth at level 1. The Forsworn are beast!

Third that. Folks who think it is too easy cause you can reload a prior save and eventually win a battle are welcome to play DiD. Problem solved.

1) There are mods to make things more difficult, add immersion and many other things. This is a good thing.
1a) There are different regions already. The higher you go, in regards to altitude, the tougher the enemies usually are. So if you go climbing a mountain, you can expect to encounter harder enemies.
2) Why should there be? This is an age-old tradition in gaming. If you're level 1 and you run off past the lowbie area, you should expect to be eaten.
2a) No. You complain about it being too easy and then turn around and suggest a method of making it easier.
3) There is a consequence for dying. It reloads at your last save, which can sometimes be a significant loss of time invested if you don't think to save often.

The harder areas are not apparent to the players in the game so it's easy for low levels to get in over their heads and for higher levels to lack any challenges.

I was thinking that there could be discussions in the taverns and advice from important NPSs on where to go adventuring. Make regions of the map different levels of difficulty for diffent levels of charactors.

If you don't like how Guild Wars reduces your effectives when you die then how would you handle the following:

find difficult bad guy to fight.
save
repeat
try to kill
while not successful

Part of a sandbox/RP game is exploring and learning where you're able to hunt and quest. Marking off the areas clearly takes away a huge portion of immersion or adventure.

And talking to NPCs often does exactly what you're suggesting. They have quests to fetch something or news of a bounty the Jarl wants called in. These usually will not send you to areas you're not capable of tackling. Sometimes it's good to throw in a quest like that, though.

I personally like it just the way that it is.

Also not a fan of the. "Oh I died.. OLOLOL! I'm back." - If you're talking about auto-resurrection upon death?