The thing is, TES is not one genre. Arena was a stock dungeon crawler. Daggerfall was more of a sweeping epic. Redguard was action-adventure (I gather; I never got it to run). Battlespire was more locked-room horror. Morrowind - I dare not try to put a label on it. Oblivion was schlock high fantasy. Skyrim is "Swords & Sorcery" ... and it pulls the genre off
brilliantly in my opinion. Certainly better than any other CRPG I can think of.
If you saw the trailer, you should have known what you were getting. If not, then you have never seen Conan the Barbarian, which is your fault, not the game's

Swords & Sorcery simply doesn't have shiny white good guys or rainbow kitten happy endings. The heroes are just tough guys trying to get by, often faced with nightmarish evil power and somehow prevailing without all of them getting killed. If you actually see a guy dressed all in white, you better believe he's super evil. The solutions to problems are never win/win; they're about making the best of bad situations. If Bethesda HAD put kitten happy endings into Skyrim, this entire homage to my favorite genre of fantasy (pulp) would be ... well ... corrupted.
So we can't really have it both ways. Sorry you didn't get what you wanted, but I did. If that's your cue to call me an "emo kid" or otherwise insult people who don't like black & white stories, knock yourself out.
tl;dr: get your Metropolis out of my Gotham.