It was a player choice to use the best one. Im the kind of guy who unchecked it.
It was also a designer choice to make it largely sub optimal to use other actions, in part because there was only 1 kind of physcal damage.
In daggerfall the effect is subtle but noticable if you look for it.
Half the problem with morrowind's system, and a lot of game's similar systems, is that it's the same buttons to move as it is to select your attack. There's no such thing is walking backward and thrusting, because thrust is the up key and walk backward is the down key. And since players generally are limited to 2 hands it's hard to find a way to allow them to direct their attacks, without just using up all the available buttons on those two hands.
Daggerfall did it with mouse movements, and I admit it's been a really long time since I played that, but as I recall it was kinda like motion controls, hard to make the guy do what you actually want him to do. Plus it was hard to tell that it made any difference, so I typically resorted to just flailing the mouse back and forth as fast as possible.
I would love to see a big open game like this put in some melee attack variety, but as it's such a small part of the game it seems doubtful you'd get anything more than an inconvenient and annoying half assed system, like in morrowind.