This has always pissed me off about Bethesda, and it's symptomatic of their issues as game developers.
There's no fucking bash door/bash chest mechanic, you have go to mods for those. Even though there's been a) spells that open locks, b) quest items that open locks and c) custom built trap mechanisms for some traps, in Bethesda's world, decades of good RPG precedent pretty much goes ignored. "Why wouldn't anyone pick locks?" the discussion went at the Bethesda dev meeting. "We put lock picks everywhere, beginning locks aren't hard to pick AT ALL, you don't even need the perk tree......Letting fighter types bash locked stuff open is more work for little pay off for us."
In how many games is there a convention for fighter types to smash locked objects? How often does that have meaningful consequences that actually impact your decision to break something, or go look for a key? Having done plenty of lock picking in real life, it's a fucking skill. It's time consuming, delicate work and the outcome is not certain. There's plenty of reasons why modern criminals don't learn to pick locks, why it's reserved for master criminals. It's easier to smash and grab.
So sorry for the diatribe, but it's the combination of little things like that which show me time and again Bethedsa isn't thinking that hard about their design. They're thinking about how they can recycle things and tweak them ever so slightly in order to push another release out the door on the same code they've been using for 8 fucking years now.
Also, the "just don't do that" response doesn't really work when half the game is sitting behind locked doors and chests. You either pick locks or you don't get to find a vast majority of the loot.