I'm sure Skyrim lacked not only some skills as you mentioned. Some pieces of gear were missing, too. Armour and weapons had no endurance score since then.
Damn endurance scores, I will never, ever, forgive Bethesda simplification of armour. In Morrowind, you had pauldrons, separate gloves, boots, greaves, tons of various slots, you could wear clothing (you'd think that's more of an immersion thing, but clothing can be enchanted too!) under the armor (you also had more than ONE DAMN SLOT FOR RING, ARE YOU FOR REAL BETHESDA) and stuff like that (TBH, it should have been even more complicated). Not to mention that most of those armors looked like armor and not bunch of iron plates on straps. I mean, okay, Nords are known for using armour (or not using it) that is basically fur pants but the rest of races? Khajiits in that studded armor (or whathever the one used on promotional Dovahkiin was called) would feel horrible, not to mention the actual combat effectivenes of this armour is horrible.
Which also leads me to...
Bad Scaling Of Equipment AvailabilityIn Skyrim, there is a lot of early-game armours like fur, leather, studded, hide, scaled, iron, banded iron, (what), Stormcloak, Imperial, Forsworn, Guard and by a smaller extent, steel and Elven armour.. They are easily avaiable in huge amounts from the start of the game, there is a very high chance you will skip most of them, and main difference is their looks. And in few hours of game time, you'll get something like Dwemeric, Daedric, Orcish or whatever really armour and not even think about previous ones at all. Same thing applies to weapons, there are shittons of them and you won't use most of them at all (remember those Acient Nordic weapons you get from Draugrs?) because by the time you get to them you will have better ones.
Those are not very significant points, but still. Some spells were too alike to one another except for their damage, colour and additional effect they produced(like mana draining, setting on fire, freezing). There was no possibility to create your own spells which had been implemented in a DLC to Oblivion if I recall it correctly.
The ability to create your own spells was a major thing in Morrowind. It was damn fun, allowed mages to create spells that were even better than regular ones, also allowed to tinker with effects a bit, which was fun. The lack of creative spells and effects on armour was worse though. Remember the Boots of Blinding Speed from Morrowind? They made you run Sanic fast, but also blind, which was kind of gamebreaking until you thought of wearing a ring that prevented blindness.
The most frustrating thing I'm mad at is that since Skyrim RPG system's simplification, either of orc, nord and redguard was able to become a proficient sorcerer, even though they kind of didn't have any knacks for it. Similarly, a khajiit might easily make a decent warrior despite the fact that naturally they were not so tough as orcs.
Well, I'm personally not a fan of preventing certain races from doing something. Instead they should have a penalty (even a huge one) to learning something. After all, there were pretty good Nord mages, stealthy Orcs and Khajiit, while not tough, can be really dangerous warriors.
And there's no point mentioning that Skyrim's quests sucked in comparison to the ones from Oblivion. Then, it didn't matter whom you were -- a mage, rogue or warrior -- you HAD to have a great hp pool. Too bad I don't remeber whether there were stats like strength, intelligence etc, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were missing as well. I guess there is more cool stuff which was cut out that I must have forgotten.
Eh, depends. There were funny and nice quests in all installments of the game, but you're right, the ones in Skyrim depended mostly on fighting your way through.
(4) the advanced cooking system.
The most important thing in Skyrim obviously.
Regarding minecraft, I don't fancy immersing into this, but I think minecraft desperately wants getting more content and thus variety.
In my opinion, Minecraft lost it's "soul" after Alpha. It stopped being survival game where you built your base (and mobs were considered placeholders, at best) and turned into adventure dungeon crawler, even if combat was, is and always will be lacking at best. Don't even get me started on min-maxing SMP. It would be great to see more content, but not in this direction. Also, a big sin of Minecraft is taking mods, dumbing them down (Pistons, Horses, etc.) and calling it their own. COME ON NOW.
Unrealistic RealisticWhen I choose a realistic difficulty or maybe download a mod that claims to be realistic, I expect myself to die from one or two good hits in vital parts (of course as long as armour doesn't negate it), but also expect my enemies to do the same thing, and not to be even tougher than regular. Call it hard then, not realistic.