Morrowind > Oblivion > Daggerfall > Skyrim

I applaud your critical standards and aesthetic sensibilities, OP.

Skyrim brings nothing to stand itself out from the crowd. It is streamline and stripped of character. At first I welcomed the grim, focused tone of the game, but then I realized that when considering how generic the game itself is, it just drains the product of all possible charisma. Oblivion suffered serious problems with boring, bland content — but it had a personality to it. It's cartoonish, hard-to-take-seriously silliness helped things along more than it harmed. Skyrim is a generic RPG that brings nothing interesting or challenging to the table: it has been developed under the paradigm of fat trimming and universal accessibility. Remember the suicidal orc that you can randomly encounter in the game? Yeah, that was pretty interesting — until you find him three more times on the same exact same character session! None of the content is truly special, it is all been made mediocore and repetitive so that you can do everything on your first character.

Morrowind is a paragon of how well hand-picked content and classical mechanic character building can make a game. In amidst the numerous problems all TES games, I found features like this redeemed it from all its troubles and made for a great game. What happened to bandits all having unique names? And what about going into a dungeon and being able to find a weapon more meaningful than some scaled "Glass Sword of X Effect"? I am so sick of scaled loot making exploration and the lore behind rare items completely meaningless and causally inert.

Morrowind is worse. Whether or not you hit someone has nothing to do with your weapon making contact with them, and is instead based upon a roll of dice.

Your weapon making contact with them has nothing to do with hitting them in Skyrim either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAKoYBpjju8&feature=g-u-u

And aside from unrealistic weapon reach, at least in Morrowind you actually had to aim at the enemy model to hit them with ranged weapons and magic. So in Skyrim, with its combination of auto-aim and everyone apparently being force sensitive, I can miss above their shoulder with my weapon out of range and still hit their shoulder. Awesome.

Dice rolls are only a part of what determines the outcome, you are precluding modifiers that come into place upon character building. This can only possibly be a complaint if you made a high elf warrior trying to use a long sword without it being at least a minor skill. When you build your character with a few miliseconds of devoted thought, missing is not frequent and combat thus flows naturally. TES should function as an RPG, not some streamline action RPG. The ability to miss if you made a terrible character is part of that: the character building experience. It punishes carelessness and rewards actually paying attention to game mechanics.

Taste is relative. Obvious topic is obvious.

In the sense that experience is not an open field that any other subject and even rocks can have equal access to. What possible relevance could pointing out that individuals differ in tastes have? I am willing to bet that you are just an aesthetic subjectivist fallaciously conflating the content of experience with the object it is related to, as is typical. That is the only way I can think of that this post makes sense. A different aesthetic taste just reduces to a different aesthetic judgement; differences in judgement persist across all fields of thought — for example you have disagreements and differing judgements in what the best interpretation of quantum mechanics is. So yes, people are going to have different preferences for different games in the series, but that is not a barrier in discussing which game is better.