The first time I encountered an Elder Scroll was during the Oblivion Thieves guild questline. Essentially, it was used to remove a 300 year old curse by the Daedric Lord Nocturnal.
Okay, go through a lot of trouble to aquire this powerful artifact and it has an appropriately powerful effect, to defy a daedric lord. I was not disappointed
In Skyrim's Main Quest, you use it to have a look back in time to acquire some information.
Okay, time travel, that is certainly no small trivial matter, but I honestly thought the use of an Elder Scroll just seemed like a lazy plot device and could have been saved for something better.
In Dawnguard, Harkon needs 3 elder scrolls to blot out the sun.
This I felt was disappointing, mostly because the fact that you needed three made it feel that the Scrolls weren't these rare and powerful magical artifacts that could rewrite time and space, but rather, merely mildly powerful artifacts that were only mildly hard to obtain. It wasn't helped by the fact that you couldn't blot out the sun, but rather, cause a temporary eclipse for maybe, 30 real life seconds. An eclipse is not worthy of an Elder Scroll's power.
In TESO, in pvp, if you capture an elder scroll, your faction gets a +5% crit chance
I don't need to explain how stupid this is.
I guess the point I'm making is each time I see a Scroll in game, I get the feeling that they are less and less powerful, and they should just stop using Elder Scrolls as plot devices.