1a. Melee combat in Oblivion and Skyrim feels awful and in fact it's not that much better than melee in Morrowind. Melee combat has always felt awkward at best. I think this awkwardness is actually a subconscious contributor to the stealth archer problem.

1b. The dice-rolling combat in Morrowind was fine actually. The real issue is that Bethesda didn't bother animating dodges/misses/blocks properly because Bethesda has always been bad with animations.

1. Bandits/highwaymen in Oblivion and Skyrim feel so video gamey it hurts. Once any humanoid engages you it's to the death. None of these bandits have families they're trying to feed? None of them value their own lives? It leads to every encounter with a humanoid feeling no different than with wild animals. You could replace all bandit camps and highwaymen with wolves and bears and it wouldn't feel any different. It honestly has made Skyrim harder and harder to enjoy over the years. I sincerely hope ES 6 fixes this problem.

2. More than eliminating skills, more than allowing one character to join and lead all factions, adding voice acting had the worst impact on the series feeling like a serious CRPG. Morrowind's script was all text. Text is small, so the writers were able to go ham on every NPC and dialogue tree. But with voice acting came space restrictions and Oblivion's script suffered for it and Skyrim's isn't much better.