I'm not reading 20 pages of this thread, but I did check out Morrowind to see what the buzz was about and now have an informed opinion. In one sentence: I liked Skryim more in just about every way.
Attaching a RNG with a chance of failure on literally everything is obnoxious. I didn't bother to reload though, except once near the beginning because I was only given two flame scrolls and I'd be damned if I'd lose one to a bad roll.
When it comes to combat, it shares the same problem as the Witcher in that it's almost purely strategy: you get good damage/to-hit stats and necessary items, and you win. There was only one battle in the main quest that required me to be a bit more dynamic (the one against the mage and his two guards; I had to sneakily murder an innocent NPC downstairs who was in my way so I could then shoot at the guy from the top of the stairs, run downstairs into the bedroom and take potshots as they came down and ran towards me. Sujamma and paralyzing arrows were used of course).
And on a related note, interiors in Morrowind are way too cramped (with too many places big enough for only one person to go through), and the exteriors feel really barren. Ancient hardware limitations.
Additionally, when it comes to a game like this where there are dozens of scrolls and potions and magic properties, a list inventory is superior to a grid.
"Do you want to travel at a reasonable pace or do you want to hit things in combat" is a terrible choice to have to make.
Thanks to Tribunal and an assassin attack, I had the second best light armor in the game at level 2 at no cost, though honestly it didn't feel like it made much difference.
What I did enjoy: the investigation aspects of many of those early and mid-game quests. Talking to people and getting directions to other people was fun (up to a point), and something not really present with modern Bethesda.
However, they went too far. After the prison break, the main quest takes a downturn with having to wander all over the place tracking down 18 or so people for their damn votes. I also wasn't too fond of "go to an island, clear it out, come back, then escort someone back to the island."
One of the mods I was using broke Bolvyn Venim (I don't know which one, the only gameplay altering stuff I used was the unofficial patch, the code patch, and the least-intrusive script tidy). He was unhittable with arrows. I even made sure by temporarily cheating my marksman skill up to 100 (agility already was maxed). Thankfully I was able to kill him with four of those dread aoe arrows you can buy from one of Bethesda's official add-on merchants. I'm including this here so someone in the future can find it via search if they run into the same problem.
I didn't see what the big deal was about cliff racers until the midgame when I was forced to manually travel a lot more. And cliff racers in the endgame area, really? What purpose do they serve there except as annoyance?
I didn't bother with Tribunal and Bloodmoon content because from what I've read, they're high-level damage sponge combat crawls. I'm also only level 11. I only did the main quest, a good chunk of House Hlaalu content, and a few other things here and there.
Skyrim fixed the things I complained about above, which is why I like it better.
After so many years, Bethesda finally made something approaching good.