1. False bravado. They also say, "maybe I'm dragonborn but don't know it?"

2. Dovahkiin has the soul of a dragon. They have the same potential constrained to a mortal body, and the same drive to dominate and achieve greater power at a level that most things do not have.

3. Elder and ancient dragons are not anything special, they have higher attack and health than their lesser brethren, but there is nothing special about them. No new shouts, no special tactics, nothing. Same deal, slightly different packaging. If you can kill a lesser dragon, you can kill them.

4. Alduin is actually weaker gameplay wise than even an ancient, and his meteor attack might as well be a sneeze. There aren't enough meteors summoned, and the ones that are called miss a majority of the time, and when they do hit, it is an inconvenience at most. Not to mention, we have 3 invincible npcs tanking him for the whole fight. In fact, if he is dragged back over towards Tsun, Tsun could single handedly kill him without any action from the player aside from dragonrend. That's how much of a threat he is.

Not really interested in getting mired in a point-by point quagmire here. Just seems like you want Dragons to be tantamount to tactical nukes blowing up over towns or something. But that wouldn't leave the player with very much game to play, since most of the population of Skyrim would be dead after a few days if that were the case.

...And that's why I think Dragons are fine the way they are. There's Lore, and then there's the actual playing of a game in a world that's meant to be persistent for however long the player stays in it with one character. The attrition seems to be bad enough already for the smaller hamlets. I don't even fast travel to them directly anymore.

I'll respond specifically to 2: You don't get to arbitrarily define the motivations of the Dovahkiin. The individual player does. The Dovakiin does not possess the SOUL of a dragon; only the blood. Their motivations are still Human/Elven.

We don't know how they breed, if they breed at all...we know that Alduin is resurrecting them and we know that if not killed by a Dragonborn they can be resurrected. And we don't know their number...they could be thousand.
Elder and Ancients ARE powerful and they do inspire terror and awe, at least on Master difficulty...I had an Elder attack in Dragon Bridge while playing on the Xbox and it wiped the guards and the nonessential npcs before I was able to take it down. Haven't been attacked in a town by an Ancient yet, but I can't kill them alone if they attack me while I'm exploring/questing...and I'm level 46.
They are powerful...even basic dragons are a challenge on Master and you always encounter one. As I said, they're the weakest of their race and I'm ok with guards able to kill them...at the beginning I was upset with this, but when Frost, Elder and Ancients started to spawn and guards became less and less able to kill just one dragon.
A small "army" of dragons/blood dragons led by an Ancient could burn Skyrim cities to the ground...for "gameplay" reason this don't happen otherwise after Milmurnir's attack on Whiterun the game would be lifeless. Do a test yourself if you play on the pc...spawn 2-3 dragons in a major city and watch people die.
I agree with the user saying that you don't get the in-game idea that even basic dragons should be city-destroyers...the Dragon Race as a whole, led by Alduin was dominating the lesser races....and when I first met an Ancient I got a testment of their true power.
Weird things that need to be tweaked are named dragons, dragons shotuing and Alduin. Named dragons are too weak, while imho they should have been mini-bosses....Dragons need to know more shouts, expecially Elder/Ancient ones so they become more varied and fun...and Alduin, well Alduin is too weak to be the Eater of World, I agree with you that his meteor shout is very spectacular, but very poor in damage terms.

Yeah, I was gonna say bears are more dangerous, no matter what difficulty you play on. That's the point: relatively speaking, there are more dangerous enemies and dragons should be at the top of the food chain.

The Elder Scrolls games have a lot of lore, in fact the lore is one of the few saving graces of the game in many cases. If they cannot remain consistent within their own lore then it is little more than a formality at best to even have it.

And you are wrong on your other point. It's been know long since before release that our character has the soul of a dragon, and it is stated in-game by a certain npc that we can be influenced by the same will to domination and power that is a dragon's inborn nature.

Change your difficulty higher, and see if that adds challenge.

I have found that some dragons are easy to kill while others are a little harder.

Few people actually learn a significant amount of lore before they argue about it, but the Dragonborn blessing of Akatosh was in a book in Helgen, so it isn't hard to find.

The second part, key word is can be influenced, the player is always supposed to be the final arbiter of decision-making. Though our ability to refuse things seems to have been mostly relegated to stop talking and walk away in Skyrim.

Yep, this is exactly what I do, before I fight a dragon. They should be one of the toughest creatures in the game to fight, in my opinion.

WHAT?!! Dragons at your lvl were still hard for me, there's one time where i was looking for an Orc companion who I've previously had, i was looking for her in the stronghold, only to have the unexpected, a dragon came out of nowhere, it killed 2 miners, the chief after flicking him in the air, the companion I was looking for and then me when it was so close to death! Killed every orc in the hold. Does that sound easy?

Fought a Frost Dragon with my level 34 stage one vampire...in daylight. He went down like a sack of potatoes. Way too easy. A Bandit Chief is a greater challenge (unless backstabbed.) Guess its time to crank up the difficulty. I'm just afraid it'll turn those Bandit Chiefs into engines of destruction.

Bolded part is key. If there isn't a Dovahkiin present when your army kills a dragon, it'll only come back really angry when Alduin raises it again. I'm not 100% sure atm, but I also think the game states that Dovahkiin are also naturally adept at fighting dragons. That bit could be wrong, but my main point is the kill them forever is the paramount thing here. If you kill something and later it gets back up, you haven't defeated squat.