Acrobatics adjusted the height of your jump as well as later levels adjusted how much stamina was lost by jumping.
The problem is though that they didn't really support the need for jumping skill pretty much ever. I think there was one dungeon that ever used a jump that couldn't be made with no acrobatics.
Have you even leveled up once?
Have you even played Oblivion? The problem wasn't that they made you put points into attributes... the problem was that in order to gain attributes at any reasonable pace you had to essentially cheat the system so that you gain skill in very specific areas so that you get +10s instead of +1s. With the level adjusted encounters this meant that someone who has low attribute gain would find themselves overwhelmed (and completely overwhelmed if they weren't focusing on combat skills).
If they just had attributes grow at a fixed rate (such as 5 each point and 6 if you specialised in a skill that used it) it would have been perfectly fine.
This change in Skyrim is likely for mass market appeal and not a "Lets avoid oblivion stupidity".
And levels gives you magic and stamina points too
Yeah but I doubt that is what would prevent you from beating later enemies. Just the health.
The game specifically asks you to put modifiers on stats with bonus being given by the amount of skills you leveled up related to that stat
In Skyrim they went towards the much more popular Fallout 3 method. Your goal is to level up skills specifically so you can purchase their boon with your level up.
that the only way to increase the stuff you can carry was to increase your strength. I wonder how Bethesda managed to overcome that?
My guess? They likely ignored weight or made it pathetically easy to gain (like a weight per level thing).
Anyhow this isn't looking good so far for Elder Scrolls as a whole. They may be hitting the point where the games just stop developing.