It's not success that's bad but the corruption that seems to follow it inevitably. As soon as people get a taste of success they usually are so afraid to not continue achieving that amount of success that they'll sacrifice anything in order to get it. Bethesda seems like a prime example of this. Morrowind was really popular on consoles, so they sacrificed all of their artistic integrity for the next game to make it even more popular on consoles.
Believe it or not, that bothers some people. It's when being successful isn't a result of your art but the sole purpose of it that it becomes a bad thing.
What are oblivion's artistic demerits?
It major change was some portions of its combat engine. Which felt smoother then what morriwinds had.
It more open to modification then morriwind.
It got overall better reviews then morriwind.
It open ended game play was greatly extended.
Some well missed features from first two games made a come back.
I don't want to drive this thread completely off topic with another discussion about Oblivion's flaws, so I'll just respond to this post, and if you want to argue against me, please make another thread, or put it in the
Fallout 3: Stupidity discussion thread that's already off topic on Oblivion.
With Oblivion, Bethesda set out to create a game with as much mass appeal as possible, and sacrificed much of it's artistic credibility to do it. They completely tossed out any attempts to match the level atmosphere in Morrowind, actually turning the Imperial Province from a land of jungles, rainforests, and marshes, into a generic D&D rip off that I've no doubt was also trying to cash in on the popularity of the LotR movies. They completely removed flight and flying creatures from the game, greatly reducing the thought required for level design. They made all the cities isolated from the world, just because the console versions supposedly couldn't handle it... and that was a great excuse to remove flight. Thanks to the level scaled random enemies everywhere, everywhere now felt the same. And thanks to that allong with the new genericized Cyrodiil everywhere looked the same. The new plot was a generic "save the world" drivel, the only real unusual bit was that you weren't the chosen one, but they fixed that by making the chosen one totally useless so you did everything he would have anyway.
The Kind of Worms, the badass Necromancer lord from Daggerfall is now a measly little High Elf you can kill easily.
I was under the impression that Morrowind is far superior when it comes to modding. The dialogue system in Oblivion is a huge hamper. Just what about Oblivion is better in this area? And I'm not sure what you are thinking saying that it's more open ended since about the only difference in that area is that Oblivion has a long mandatory tutorial. Neither of these two things are really relevant though.
Professional reviews are totally unreliable. It's a documented fact that mainstream game makers bribe mainstream reviewers with fancy events, or blackmail them with information refusal.