I removed it from the article, but the whole point was kinda showing all the things a dungeon can have and Oblivion's dungeon DOESN'T.
Yeah, but I'm not going to buy/steal Oblivion and its DLC (horsearmor, lol) just to marvel at a shitty/bad/passable dungeon.
Felt very mean and bitter (it was)
This is the Codex. Not being mean and bitter is treated like mental illness (by the actual nutcases, but I digress).
The map might have mislead me into thinking it might be interesting.
For example, the entrance has a gate asking for a password. Cool, an obstacle! But the password is in a bag in front of it. And I mean LITERALLY IN FRONT:
Why? Because Oblivion doesn't have dialog trees or persuasion skills, there's no alternate paths and they don't trust the player enough to hide the diary. Tabletop RPGs would allow hundreds of solutions, from blasting the door down to disguising yourself, Fallout would have the classic combat/dialog/stealth solutions, an immersive sim would at the very least give optional paths for you to crawl through....
That actually got me to think and I think I have come up with something interesting regarding multiple entry points/paths in cRPGs, why they often end up looking like a waste of development effort (sadly they do) and some ways to prevent that.
Everything else is just walking across very obvious paths, killing the same level scaled enemies and reading poorly written notes on the ground about the lore of a mega dungeon DLC that didn't even bother to fucking name its NPCs.
I now wonder which Morrowind dungeons (if any) you'd consider good.
And what about Skyrim (yeah, I know, most dungeons are linear slogs, but not all of them, especially if you consider dungeon complexes consisting of an indoor/outdoor hostile dungeon hub connecting multiple smaller locations, and even some of the smaller, more linear ones can offer some interesting gameplay variations).
And since Oblivion's combat is so shitty, fighting for so long gets really boring, really fast.
That's very true.
In short, someone at Bethesda adapted their lame home-made D&D dungeon into Oblivion, called it "the deepest & most challenging dungeon" and sold it to suckers. And those suckers still haunt reddit, telling people that it's a good dungeon.
The sad thing is that if you compare it to all the other dungeons in this game...
Additional thought:
What about good computer non-RPG dungeons? It's not like cRPGs tend to do very good job giving player multiple verbs to use (and choose from) so they are not at actual advantage here, compared to other games.
Would, say, Azrael's Tear be a good dungeon?