@Neo

The fact that there is no urgency is just one of the conceits I'm willing to deal with to enjoy a game with so much side stuff. This is hardly a new thing. You can spend forever d**king around in Zelda games while you're supposed to be saving a princess or something else important.

I think there would be value in some urgency, but I think that has explicitly become a non-aim of TES games because, in general, it's what players want.

@Sir Hatt

I do get the pangs for Skyrim. Actually playing any of TES games gives me pangs for all of them. It just makes me want to jump in and go back over some lore stuff. I never made a point of grinding my skills up. I mean... first grinding isn't fun and from what I hear, once you have highly level smithing or enchanting, the game ceases to be fun because you're an almighty god that can smite anything with a cough. To each their own, but it takes a lot of fun out of it for me. I might as well just put it on easy and then use console hacks to give me all of the best gear in the game.

I've heard of other people missing spellmaking too, but I haven't. I like that the system makes sense and scales based on skill rather than you having 12 iterations of the same spell. Not to mention how difficult it was to manage spells in Oblivion once you have 12 iterations of 20 spells. It seems that most people who miss spellmaking miss the min-maxing which, like the above, kills a lot of the fun for me.

In regards to spellmaking, I'm also glad enchanting works as it does. It's more rewarding to get enchants from armor your disenchant for me personally.