Some people say they never Fast Travel in Skyrim. That always amazes me. I think there are (at least) 2 reasons for an occasional FT.
1. You have loaded yourself up with loot. It would take "forever" to walk back to a place to sell--and you wouldn't want to be exploring while doing that.
So, I FT to sell my loot and then FT back to the last location where I gathered the loot. From there, I proceed on foot.
2. The same with finishing a quest, if I am loaded down. I will FT the quest item to its destination (sell stuff if there are vendors) and then, as in #1 go back to where I
was by FT and continue on my way.
Thoughts?

Why not use fast travel? If you walk everywhere all you gain is bloated hours and some low level enemy's.

For someone that doesnt use fast travel, they dont try and sell every piece of equipment they find....they pick and choose what is the most vauable weight to gold ratio and only take that.

That's a good point. I do that as well.

Yeah I don't fast travel much and from the sound of it I don't loot near as much stuff as you do. I only grab things that are exceptionally valuable, have an enchantment I want or are useful. I especially try and stay away from grabbing things my character would have no use for (e.g. Heavy armor, 2h weapons) even if they are valuable. This allows me to spend much longer out in the wilds and fits RP a bit more.

I also tend to use FT when returning to quest givers - and a fair amount of other times. Recently my game glitched and FT stopped working, and it was actually quite annoying. It might be better if there were carts at every town, but they are only at a few of them.

I usually only fast travel if I'm worried a quest is going to glitch or I've got to escort someone really stupid. Generally I only loot what I can reasonably carry, no suits of armor or heavy weapons. I have a relaxed playstyle I don't want to rush around the game and quite often will get sidetracked finding where a trail leads/exploring a newly discovered cave. There's quite a few random encounters I would have missed fast traveling. The only problem I have with not fast traveling is imagining how a person in heavy armour would do all that walking/running.

I am only able to grab a couple of hours here and there to play. I walked from Riften to Whiterun just to experience the wilderness - never again. It must have taken 5 RL days and all I did was die and reload over and over. When I finally got to Whiterun I fell to my knees and cried and the guard let me in.

From now on only when I'm bored/can't decide what to do next.

If you FT all the time you may miss out on some interesting radiant quests

Oh I know. I had some fun but I really wanted to get some business out of the way. I think maybe I need a vacation from all my guild responsibilities and just explore.

Due to the nature if the game most of the really great stuff is found running around in the world and you miss it all when you fast travel.

the best reason I've found for fast traveling is it's a single player game and as such my fast traveling doesn't affect anyone in any way other than myself. those people that pipe up from time to time about the do's and don'ts have waaaaaay too much time on their hands and have nothing better to do with their time other than to dictate to some faceless random on the net.

i find myself fast traveling more than usual because this pos game crashes all the effing time and there is no autosave when just traveling far lengths on foot. ill be close to my destination after an hour of exploring/traveling and the game will crash. yea i could save more often but also this game could not crash no?