Neo can I ask you, in a totally non-accusatory way, how long you played Morrowind & Oblivion for? I'm not suggesting you didn't give them a chance, rather, in my experience, these are games that take some time to get the boulder moving, but once its going, you can't pull yourself away from the game and you get "just one more quest" syndrome. It just takes time to really build up that setting.

I understand your frustration with the appreciation it gets, the only thing that ever really bothered me were the assertions that open-world action-oriented Western games are better than linear, tactical Japanese games (of course no one puts it in terms like that). To me, the praise that's heaped on the open-endedness is a little misplaced, as you can either have a long, engrossing single player story and a decent amount of side quests, or a billion sidequests and a decent amount of main story. I can't say which is better inherently, especially since some of my favorite JRPGs like DQVIII and FFXII have massive, sprawling, explorable open worlds.