I guess it's easy to compare it to Fallout since that's what they last worked on. I haven't played Fallout since I gave up on Fallout 2, so I pretty much come from an Elder Scrolls background.
I look at this as an extension of how I played the game anyway. I would start out with what I thought would fit my playing style based on the names of the skills, but then when I would get back into the world some skills would level too quickly and others were hard to level without sitting there doing the equivalent of whittling wood, and when you advanced some skills too quickly it made stat increases uneven... I LIKED gaming the system, don't get me wrong, but I found I restarted the game a lot because, unlike appearance, it wasn't easy to gauge the kind of character I wanted based on descirptions before I even entered the game world. It's not like with pen and paper, where the GM can change the world to fit your character a bit more, or you can ask to switch stuff around so your character better fits the campaign. The world is the way it is, and if you don't quite fit in, you'll have a lot of wasted time and effort trying to realize that.
I like adapting to the world, I like imagining what I'd do in a given situation and changing my tactics, and I like it when I get some limitations, or things are less optimized and more challenging. BUT, with the system they have set up since Daggerfall, I also felt there was an unnecessary conflict between me and the system, something that just got in the way of me exploring and skilling up.
So I see this as a natural progression. Now I sort of build my class as I go, based on what I've chosen to do. If I go in with an RP mindset, moving past opportunity for weapons use and just using spells, then the character builds that way, and I sort of create a mage on the fly, but I also am using the exact mage skills I want to achieve that goal. I don't have to guess how useful Alteration spells are going to be, I just use the spells I wanted to use and get the "mage" anyway.
I tend to blend tactics (utility spells, weapon specialization, and plenty of stealth), so I always created a custom class and tried my best to guess how useful it would be. Now that that's not a consideration I can just sort of dive in and, at the end, look at my character sheet and say "yeah, that looks like a weird hybrid class I never would have guessed at the start." It suggests that there will be a cool end-game reflection, where you look at the path you've traveled and, like a character from a book, finally learn what path you've travelled.
The one thing I see being an issue is that if the player base tends toward certain skills, and if the Bethsoft team are keeping stats, they may look at characters in aggregate and say that certain types of skills aren't necessary anymore. It's one thing to get rid of acrobatics and athletics, which were things pretty much everyone could use, it's another to, say, get rid of a certain type of weapon or spell just because not enough people used it. This may make personalization less interesting in further ES games, where characters are even narrower in their possibilities. It's up to the Bethsoft team to avoid that pitfall.
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