I played a lot of Skyrim at release but eventually decided to hold off on the main quest due to running into so many bugs.

So here I am 9 months later, after several patches, and my new play-through as has STILL been bug ridden. Trying to ignore them and press on, sometimes requiring me to backtrack to older saves to be able to complete quests, I run into the stupidest bug that has just made me have enough of this game once again.

On the first Alduin fight, which should have been a high point in the game, I complete the fight and talk to Paarthurnax, only to have him spin way up into the air to the point that I cannot hear what he is saying. I do the fight over hoping it's just a random bad luck glitch and the same exact thing happens again.

So then, instead of playing, I am googling this bug - only to find it has been known since last year! How many patches later, they didn't bother to fix such on obvious bug on the main quest!?!?!

I am really glad I did not further support this crap by purchasing Dawnguard, which I'm sure is also a bug ridden mess, the quality control at Besthesda must just be a joke. BTW, I am playing with zero mods, in the hope to eliminate this sort of thing, but I guess that is moot.

There's unofficial patch mods... They work quite well.

Half of the bugs out there are attributed to the player behaving silly. Things such as jumping on walls while fighting things which makes you fall through, talking to NPC's and for laughs entering a house while they talk which breaks the conversation and quest, pushing NPC's with sprinting until they get stuck and won't complete their quests, and so on. Ofcourse, the game should be foolproof, that sort of behaviour should not break it, but a lot of the bugs out there on the web are from people who either use mods or do not play the game normally.

Unfortunately, your Paarthurnax bug sounds like one of those pre-patch something bugs that are forever burned into your savegame. I had one with the White Phial quest, where the game pre-patch 1.3 or so could not properly calculate how many days had passed and never sent out the courrier. They are usually fixed when you make a brand new character and delete the old scripts still in your data (creation kit installs scripts which often do not update, being the main cause why many Dawnguard people on PC can't feed while standing, or why quests get buggy, double installs are almost a must for creation kit).

If you got creation kit, be wary that those scripts it silently installs OVERRULE the new patched scripts, breaking things. It has often done so for me.

It's a new game I started with the latest patch, it's not an old save game issue. You don't have to do anything weird for NPC's to follow you through doors either. A guard can simply walk past you as you are going into breezehome and he will follow you into the house to finish whatever useless [censored] he is saying, how they decided that was okay to leave in the game is beyond my understanding.

Are you saying by simply installing the Creation Kit it can break things? I installed it earlier today to take a look at the "wolf queen awakened" quest because the courier isn't showing up, ugh.