Who'd have thought it! I always craft, at least one type anyway, and sometime more. But I just didn't get to it in the current playthrough and it makes loot or rewards so much more interesting.

Not crafting also lets you level more slowly, accumulate less gold, and avoid collecting raw materials (which always feels tedious). I'm still not buying any gear from vendors so it's easier to avoid becoming over powered. All together, it's kind of nice to spend time mostly adventuring, resting, adventuring etc. I love how many ways there are to play Skyrim.

i've played stealth characters like that. I feel like if you rely on magic or just wading in with heavy armor alchemy is pretty important just to produce helth/magicka potions

I like to do something similar with my magey type characters. Unless game mechanics require it I like to only "find" spells rather than just buy them. There's something very satisfying about finding a new spell that makes it me feel like I truly earned it rather than just chopping wood to sell so I can just buy it. This play style also slows down the game for me because I really have to strategize because I level naturally, but don't always have the better spells in my arsenal to deal with the more difficult situations/mobs. Sometimes less IS more!

My characters only craft when it is appropriate for them to do so. As a result, many of my characters don't craft at all. Out of the ones that do, about half have done Smithing, about 10% have done some Alchemy and none of my characters have done any Enchanting.

I'm with Pseron. It all depends on what my character is about. But I will never "not craft" just to make the game more interesting. If the character calls for it then I'll do it. If it doesn't then I won't.

I tried this approach once with a mage, but the spells books turned up so infrequently, I gave up. Waiting to find the appropriate spell forced me to use lots of non-mage behavior and strategy so the build warped into something else. Now I pretty much buy spells whenever I can, but impose other limitations which make it harder to become over-powered.

I too used to have this problem, but then as a part of roleplay (my character being smarter than myself) thought "hmmmm I bet necromancers and the like would have spells", so quite often he would seek out their lairs and would tend to find more spell books that way than if he just hit bandit camps and draugr dungeons. But as you stated in your opening it is great that there are so many ways to play.

Yeah exactly. I've had some characters who do smithing / crafting, and others who don't. It's fun either way, right?