Hi everyone, i'm playing Skyrim.
I like to explore the dungeons only when i get a quest for it, because it makes it more purposeful to me.

I want to know if locations get populated when i discover it or when i actually enter it and if discovering (but not exploring) a location prevents quest givers to assign quests for that location. Right now, when i run around to get to dungeons i purposefully avoid discovering new locations for fear that they gets populated with low level characters and items and/or i will never get any quests pointing there, which would leads me having a whole bunch of unexplored locations sitting in my map which i'm never going to actually explore because either i have no quests for it and enemies are low level. At the opposite i would like to discover locations (and not explore them) if i knew someone will eventually give me some quests pointing there anyway and/or i knew that enemies would be leveled when i actually entered the instance, instead of when i discovered it. The problem arise because i think there are some locations which are actually quest starter (i.e. houses of quest givers, riddles) and not quests destination, which makes my approach to the game bugged because i would simply never find those.

I believe the dungeon gets leveled when you enter. I'm not positive though.

I think that dungeons only get populated when you actually enter them, and no it doesn't prevent people from assigning a quest to that location, usually, if a quest takes place there, only part of the dungeon will be available to explore, and the part taken for the quest will be blocked off (usually by rubble) and will be removed when the associated quest is received.

It doesnt matter, experienced this myself, went into a dungeon, cleared it out from top to bottom, and got out, next person i meet gives me a quest for that exact same dungeon and everything in there a few days later was like it never been touched.
I play on PC and have quite a few mods installed but as far as i know noone of them change anything on respawn behaviour unless there readme didnt included that So safe to say it wont interfere with quests if you go exploring a dungeon out of the blue. If it is quest related, you either wont be able to enter it, or the quest item/person wont be there. As far as i know theres only one dungeon so far i found that can be broken and it considers loot.