If you're really a thief, you don't need bribery because nobody sees you and you don't need fence because "us thieves" are using the Thieves Guild fences. If you want to be a thief without entering Thieves Guild then ok, you'll need fence, but it's so high that you can't start being a thief before a long time, so can you really call yourself a thief? If you want to play rough and not reload when a 90% chance of success steal fails again, bribery may sound like a solution, but it's faster to become thane and bribe the guards anyway.

Speech doesn't raise fast at all. What are you doing to raise it? Buy and sell cheap items one by one for hours, grinding the skill like in a MMORPG? Type the console command already, save yourself sanity.

And about the influence of Speech for Persuasion and Intimidation, read what I wrote again. I think I was explicit : yes the skills influences the success, but who cares? In vanilla Skyrim, Persuasion and Intimidation aren't used properly, making them useless.

Yes my thief is guildless.. (Was in the thieves guild on my first thief) did not like them.. And yes i could join and use thief guild fences.. But it feels rather good to know i can sell anything to anyone..

No i dont grind.. I said it was easy, just sell [censored] i find on the way.. (Flowers and whatnot)..

And yes console command could work.. If your into "cheating" Why not console command the entire character and save you ALOT of sanity? (Like armor skills)

And if i fail a pickpocket, i fail.. I dont reload for just that case.. Its boring and not needed really.. And for some reason, my "Am a thane screw you" option dont always seem to work

fair enough but im not sure how hard it is to learn by example, they used the same damn engine.

Good point. Well maybe Beth will pay attention and address it in the future....either in a DLC or the next version.
I have played all of these games (still do) and must say that I enjoyed the FO version that was more important for faction/interaction purposes rather than the mercantile used in TES. It certainly made the game more interesting when the things you did affected how NPCs reacted to you!

I was looking forward to more of this in the game. In Morrowind, most quests had a peaceful or relatively peaceful option, Speech/Personality meant something. In Oblivion, Speech turned into a minigame where the skill did not matter which was a step backward. Speech had an effect in the game, just the character's skill had no effect in Speech. In the Fallouts, most quests could be solved the Speech route if your skills were up there. It was not the only way, but it was a real option to most or all quests. I was looking forward to this being applied in Skyrim.

I would have loved Fallout style speech checks in Skyrim. It allowed you to RP a peaceful negotiator, as well as tremendously helping replay value.