Just use the Oghma Infinum glitch when you find the book... you can instantly max out your character.

Skyrim and Fallout 3 (which employs a similar leveling system / enemy leveling as well) were my two favorite games of this past gen.

When you have gained enough experience to level up your character you don't have to level up your character unless you want to.

I agree on that the crafting skills are too grindy to level though, but I still enjoy the system.

Yes, it was much severe in Oblivion but there is still the strength cap. So over time you will level up even with smaller skills which will make enemies stronger while you still sit at the same DPS you were 100h ago. Mitigating the problem doesn't erase it. If you take the extreme example of completely mastering every skill, you will be outmatched. As opposed to every other RPG where if you max your character all your enemies will be outmatched.

They could've mitigated the problem even further if they'd set the skill level cap a lot higher and in case of a destruction mage, have a lot more spells to choose from.

It just feels stupid to have a massive RPG with hundreds of hours of playtime only to be maxed out after 50h when you stop advancing your character and are just going through the motions.

I screwed myself in Oblivion, ignoring the main quest too long. The allies that are supposed to help you don't level up, so they end up dead in 2 seconds, leaving you to face impossible odds. Luckily you could reduce the difficulty.

Skyrim initially became a bit harder then laughably easy as a destruction mage. I did go through with enchanting, using smithing to make stuff to enchant. After a while I had 100% mana reduction for destruction magic and access to the highest level area of effect spells. Just spam those as fast as you can click the mouse button...

I like Dark souls' leveling system (for PvE, don't care about PvP) Good balance between upgrading stats and upgrading gear.

Have to agree. I put nearly 200 hours into skyrim and all its DLC but it has so many flaws and I just cannot fathom the amount of GOTY awards it ended up receiving. The leveling in the game is pretty bad but I don't think It can get much better because the combat in the game is atrocious, especially if you don't use magic. It needs a good combat system to compliment a good leveling system and TES games have none.

I only level up when I need HP and I don't have potions.

You can't credit mods to Bethesda, they just created a good environment for them.

Yeah, Dark souls has a great leveling system for PvE. PvP is an abomination on dark souls though, the netcode for the game is so so bad. It is interesting that  they take into account your soul level rather than the level of your character for PvP and summoning of other players. What if you were to lose a large amount of souls which you'd never get to spend or spend a number of souls on one particular build buying and upgrading the appropriate armor and weapons only to change your mind and go down a different path with different armor and weapons to those you upgraded? You could get punished for that.

"I will always prefer games that will from the start confront me with impossible to defeat enemies. It gives me something to strive for and makes it easy to create an atmosphere of actual danger around you. JRPGs and a certain other open world WRPG do this very very well." If this sentence is true then you will love Xenoblade but you probably played it already, if you didn't though... you must play it!

About Skyrim... the game isn't fun. I sold the game as I was spending more time browsing the internet than playing the game, I think I got like 40 hours of idle time on that game, a fucking record.

I'll cover your 3 main points

1. Learning by doing for every skill
2. Enemies will level with you or will replaced by stronger enemies
3. Every skill increase counts towards your level

1. I find no fault in this. I'm glad you have to craft 1000's of things to max out your level in smithing and not just a handful. I mean you swing your sword millions of times, yet you want to build one leather set of armor and be a master?

2. A good concept but shoudl work more like leveling tiers. have an area be enemies level 1-10. If your in that range they are your level, if your higher they are maxed at lvl 10. Another area be lvl 40-50. If your level 10, they are level 40. if your level 44, they are 44. If your lvl 60 they are lvl 50. You get the gist.

3. I am annoyed by this as well, they need to have it somehow calculate your combat skills. I mean I level up smithing like crazy for example in teh beginning and now i'm lvl 10. But I have like zero combat skills. Now enemies are too hard for me to kill cause I suck ass cause smithing leveled me up, or whatever skill did.

BTW there are many mods that changed things up and more fit what I liked. You shoudl check out mods.