Totally feel you on the combat system, it's an older style of things and not a lot of people like it. I fully understand why. Personally though, I rather enjoyed having to carefully plan my character build point by point, it made my characters feel more personalized and unique and made my point placement so much more important. This is a big reason I was put off by Diablo III. It's a personal preference sort of thing.

I have to disagree with you on the lockpicking argument though, here's why, in both Oblivion and Skyrim where lockpicking was a minigame, taking a single point in lockpicking was pointless for me because I could always win the minigame with sufficient lockpicks. I honestly didn't even need that many, at that. I wished they had gone the Fallout route and completely restricted higher level locks from you if you weren't skilled in lockpicking. In Morrowind, if you wanted to break locks and traps, you had to know how, yes it was kind of lame to spam the lockpick over and over until you got it, but I still prefer that to being able to pick a master lock with a massive Orc brute with no prior knowledge of the craft.

Morrowind will always be my favorite, but in the end, they're different games and should be treated as such. When I want a deep RPG experience, I roll a character in Morrowind, when I want visceral combat, a plethora of mods with frequent updates and shouting people off of cliffs, I roll a character in Skyrim. We don't have to pick just one game, people, we can have both.