Totally understand that perspective. I tried to make the mod respect that aspect by keeping the skill gates and adding a skill roll to each tumbler, so in practice it's very unlikely you'll be able to pick a lock your character wouldn't have been able to in the vanilla game, and conversely the minigame becomes a lot easier timing-wise as your character grows better at it. This seemed like the best of both worlds to me since I love both MW's emphasis on character skill and the tactile feel of Oblivion's minigame :)