Is that a joke? How does not having epic loot dumb a game down? it's the opposite in fact, since the most dumb games rely on epic loot crawling as their main mechanic, Warcraft, Diablo, Borderlands. No offense to these games, they are fun games, but they are dumb games.
So when you pick up a sword that is the stuff of legends, the reaper or souls, the slayer of entire armies. A weapon more legendary than you, the Dragon Born, or anything you could ever hope to create and it is weak as hell that doesn't come across as one of the single stupidest things ever?
I'm not talking stat impairment like legit RPGs where they ether don't let you wield it or you wield it horribly. I'm talking about in game Loot Scaling which is just stupid!
Worse is when you are one hit killed by an enemy. All you can think about is how epic the weapon you are going to get is going to be. Hell if it is weak it will at least fetch a fair price at market. You've done the math, it has to be decent or be using decent arrows and you kill the guy and it is a hunters bow with elven arrows or a basic Ancient Nord Sword. This would make sense if there were stat based things like Endurance, Strength, Dexterity, or whatever skill governs what but no it is simplistic, dumbed down, health, magic, or stamina so you rule that out. The next course you think of is well it must be the skill tree which is a skill tree not a Perk Tree as advertised but whatever, so you do the math and no it can't be that because you have 150 health and at best it could only two hit you, even with critical.
So yeah Loot scaling is stupid! Making them Skill based but not implementing it fully because it would scare off the main stream market (which isn't even true but someone in Bethesda thinks so) is stupid. It is dumbing down plain and simple.
Now I'm not talking conditions or varying weapon stats which would be epic to find swords with different condition left and even different stats because they were made from different forges by different smiths or even having to bust your posterior to find a weapon crafted by a master craftsman. All that would be intelligent and would make ES an epic game. I'm not saying I want an epic weapon in every boosh ether but when I crawl through ruins past Drauger Overlords to reach a weapon of legend used to slay 1000 vampires or whatever I'd like it to actually be EPIC instead of well you're only level 13 (enemy scaling another dumbing down) so the weapons stats will be svck leaving your current weapon better than the weapon of legend that killed 1000 vampires, save an empire, and got the emperor laid on a hourly basis (it was a pretty epic weapon after all).