It seems so unfortunate to me what has become of these skills. I'll start with the less egregious, Lockpicking. First off, let me clarify that I love what has been done with the skill itself. It took everything that was wrong in Fallout (being unable to unlock certain things unless you had a high enough skill) and Oblivion (locks that weren't really challenging, even with low level skill and high level locks) and fixed it. My problem lies in the fact that Lockpicking is now the only way to open stuff (apart from the Tower stone), as opposed to previous games where there was a magical option. I'm the kind of player that has to check every nook and cranny in a dungeon, cause I wants me some loot. That's why you go into a dungeon, you get loot. As such, when there's a locked something, I have to get into it, otherwise I might miss out on new armor/weapons/etc. What bugs me is that this means that Lockpicking is always going to increase for me, no matter what my character build is, and for me this kind of devalues the skill. Just having one skill-based alternative (i.e.: Alteration) would totally change this for me.

However, that's just a minor complaint that doesn't actually have much bearing on the game since, as I said, the skill itself is otherwise well done. Speech on the other hand...well, there's a skill that just took it up the ***. Similar to Lockpicking, my Speech goes up automatically regardless of character build because I sell my loot. You know, cause it's an RPG, and that's sort of a big part of RPG's, is finding loot, selling it, and using the proceeds to get new gear/a house/a horse/whatever floats your boat. Now, if you're actually trying to use Speech as a skill, well, good luck. Apart from just selling a buttload of stuff, your only option is passing speech checks, and those can be few and far between, unless you know where to look for them. Since half of what you do to raise speech is the same as what you do with any character and the other half is simply lacking, I can't help but feel like the skill is a little invalidated.

To be fair, these are really just quibbles, but hey, general discussion forum, I think this is the appropriate place. I just think things are a little bit screwey when a mage-based character has Speech and Lockpick skill that pace the actual magic skills for a good portion of the game.

i wish there was much more to speech

Thing is, you can make money in infinitely different ways that do not level up your speech. Getting rare loot from locked chests is the benefit of lock-pick. Without that benefit, it'd be useless.

What I'd say is wrong with lock-pick is not that it's the only way to open locks, but that when you get better in it, you only consume less lock-picks per lock. I can open master locks with 15 lock-pick with 15-40 picks.

I played 110 hours, selling loot and stuff and I even trained my speech a bit. It was only 50 after that time. It won't level up fast at all if you try going all mage, because I ended up with 50 speech with a rogue character who had the thieves stone chosen at all times.

Yeah, I know. I guess my real problem is I just miss the open spell. But as for Speech, I picked the Atronach stone, and my magic skills only started to outstrip my speech skill when it was around 40. Keep in mind that when you go mage, buying those spell tomes is not cheap, ergo it gives your speech a bigger boost (plus having to sell a hefty amount of loot to afford said tomes). Finally, in response to the infinitely different ways of money making, yes there are, but wood-chopping and mining aren't quite as effective as selling enchanted items. Be kind of nice if bartering weren't passive, but you could control it to some degree like in previous ES games to increase how much you raise your skill as well as getting a better price.