Enchanting is fine as long as you are enchanting for a mage. Smithing and Enchanting are too overpowered though when you are creating items for melee characters.

Perhaps what should happen is that enchanting should be a skill that focus's on increasing magic output, while smithing focus's on increasing melee damage.

I use both, but don't grind them. If I have the materials I use them. If I don't, I don't go out of my way to forage for them. So far I haven't felt too powerful for the game world.

I decided early on that it would be one or the other for any given character build, never both. that being said, i never buy the components i need for a given piece or armor or weapon, nor do i buy soul gems or enchanted items to disenchant. I only use what i find to disenchant, and i go and mine my own ore/ find materials myself. Also, the level of my crafting skills can never be more than two and a half times my level. so by level 40, my skills will be allowed to be maxed out. Not only does that keep me from using them early (if i start with a Crafting skill at 20, i can't increase it until I'm level 9), but that slows down my skill progress in the support builds enough to not 1- kill the game by getting crazy good equipment too early. or 2- get myself killed repeatedly because I'm a master smith at level 15, with absolutely no combat skills to survive encounters.
Sure, its kind of lame i have to limit myself to increase my enjoyment, but honestly, there are worse things, like Oblivion's min-maxing each level in order to stay relevant later in the game. I'd much rather slow my progress down and take my time. There is plenty of stuff to do in Skyrim, I don't waiting until I'm level 35 to get Daedric armor i going to kill me.

Enchanting is NOT fine if you're a mage. It is WAY too powerful. I've been enjoying the game for two days now and really liked that it felt quite challenging on expert, but I just recently got to lvl 100 on enchanting and tried enchanting my gear using a potion that gives me 20% stronger enchantments. All right, so now I can trow destruction spells for ZERO mana and I'm practically immune to spells. Wtf? I can't die. I'm killing everything without breaking a sweat, bosses and regular foes alike. On the hardest difficulty level.

I got quite disappointed with this. I wanted to be a mage but I didn't want to exploit the game to this extent with enchanting.

And not only that. If you know alchemy as well, and know how to make potions that enhances your enchantments, you can go back and forth between enchanting and alchemy to make gear that improves your health and magicka by several hundred points.

The enchantment tree is broken. There should be some regulations. Now I'll have to start over and completely ignore the enchantment tree. I don't want to spend the 200 or so hours I have left of this game feeling like I've activated God mode.

I decided to limit my smithing skill to the same range as my 1 hand skill.

It needs to be nerfed, but the ability to create my own named weapons and pieces of armor was probably my favorite part of Oblivion, so I'm not about to avoid it in Skyrim. I noticed New Vegas received a number of balance tweaks in its updates for stuff that in my opinion was less glaring, so hopefully they'll be able to bring some challenge back to the later stages of the Skyrim with the upcoming patch.

Actually it causes you to "overlevel" (if such a term exists) and the advantage that you get from better gear will diminish due to stronger enemies and relatively weaker combat skills. I made a mistake of going the light armor route for blacksmithing, and enemies now can 2-shot me as a rogue at level 35ish. I am stuck with a glass dagger when I should have gone for daedric daggers, and now there are some enemies that I cannot 1-shot.

Blacksmithing is indeed too cheap to level, compared to buying the training from a trainer. There's something wrong if a trainer costs you say 2000 gold to level up once, and it only costs you a fraction of that amount in iron to level it yourself.
There are actually diminishing returns for iron improvements. Improving iron daggers will not give you as much skill increase as improving dwarven daggers. But for some reason creating iron daggers doesn't have diminshing returns.

An easy fix for this is to scale the skill increase with the base price of the item created, like for alchemy. The more expensive the base price of the item created, the higher the skill increase.

But the thing is, there is a reason for you to keep making potions. Potions disappear after being consumed once, so you have to keep making them as you play the game. Thus you can level Alchemy just by playing the game.
Whereas there is no "natural" way to increase blacksmithing while you play the game. Once you have made the armor for yourself, that's it. There's no other reason to make more armor while playing the game. Thus the only way to level blacksmithing is through grinding it and then selling the spare stuff.
So maybe blacksmithing is easier to level to compensate for this problem.

Or maybe we can slow down blacksmithing, but introduce new proactive ways to level it. Say, let people melt weapons and armor down to ingots (1/2 or 1/4 of the mats it takes to make them) which gives them free ingots to make stuff and thus level blacksmithing. That saves you money from having to buy the expensive ingots yourself.

I less restricted myself and more just... found them way too boring to use. Crafting consumes a lot of time doing tedious things that I could be spending doing other things.

Like others have said, I also try to follow a RP design for my characters. The current one is a light armoured Khajiit warrior with a bit archery and some basic knowledge of smithing. And stealth, since he is a cat! Smithing is a skill that improves as needed and serves my character mainly to upgrade items, not to make them. As a player, half my fun comes from finding gear. If I made the best gear myself, the aspect of treasure hunting would be lost for me.

For me, the trick of enjoying a TES game has never been to figure out how to make a strong character, but always how to avoid making it too strong.

Both of these are fairly balanced by themselves. The true power comes from Alchemy.

Then you haven't reached 100 in enchanting, otherwise you wouldn't be saying that.

I use smithing but only take steel and arcane blacksmith.

No. Both skills are fine if you don't cheese them.
Resist making 10,000 daggers and only make stuff you'll use.

Looked interesting, but I have other skills to worry about, need to save perk points for Pickpocketing, Sneak, Restoration, Archery, Alchemy and perhaps some more Illusion or Speech.
Though if my new character after this one is interested in those skills then I will pick one, not two, just one.

i play a mage and feel liek they are both essential if you want to be a good destro mage... therefore i made sure to level them.. im lvl 35 with both maxed

WOW, this is why games are getting so dumbed down, a monkey could do enchanting in this game.. LOL. Sad.

This.

At level 34, I've just hit 60 Smithing (which means I can finally improve my found magic items! ).

I've got one or two pieces of armor that I've crafted, the rest is loot I've found. Sword & armor were improved before I put minor enchantments on them. (My enchanting's in the 40's... enough to stick Soul Trap on my sword, but not to do much with stats. Especially since it's not perked.)

I'm really bad at managing crafting, so I never level up quick. I can't see myself hitting those crazy godlike numbers because I'm not dedicated enough for it. Right now, I want some good fortify magicka regen on my battle mage, but I find it hard to manage my time well enough not to grind it. Progression is hard.

How does that work? Id think you would have trouble even getting enough skill to make dwarven.

Not on my current character, but when I make my next one I will be staying away from it. Even on my current character, I didnt want to cheese and powerlevel it, I only wanted to be able to slightly upgrade the gear I have. Problem is, I was soon finding gear that I was no where near being able to upgrade via smithing because my smithing level was so low. I do think that once my level was high enough to be upgrading orcish/ebony, it was high enough to upgrade it to insane levels WITHOUT using all the enchanting cheese.

But when I make a ranger I will just be making hide and leather.

Pretty much this, although I never really did it to begin with.

wtf DO PEOPLE CARE HOW OTHERS PLAY AND ENJOY THE GAME? Smithing and Enchanting are there for gamers to use..................... Play how you like, that is all.

no offense but you are horribly wrong here:

Why can't we discuss it? I for one think all the skill trees should have their strong and weak points, and you shouldn't really be "punished" for not choosing one or the other. As it is now, all the other skill trees combined (combined!) are not even nearly as good as the enchanter skill tree alone.

I'll tell you this: If you could have all the perks in all skill trees except enchanting and alchemy and wear the best gear in the game that you could find from quests etc, and I could perk in enchanting and alchemy only and use my skills on the worst gear in the game, I would still beat you in combat. It wouldn't matter what level you were, you could be level 80 and I lvl 20, you still wouldn't stand a chance. Is it so "wrong" as a player to think this is something that should have been done differently?

Well if I find it way too easy I will. But at the moment I find that while I deal damage fast (yeah I use dual wield and 3 +33% 1h items) I still die in 1-2 hits. Mages are real bane because they one shot me (so I really need gear with enchanted resists ). Real cheeze is freeze shout , companion and summon staffs. With these you can take on any mobs with any weapon regardless of your smithing or enchant.

I think it is unbalanced in some ways but its manageable (i can take of my +% items, i can stop using freeze shout , etc)