Option 1 is good, but if they show up as often as they say in interviews then it will become annoying if you have to run away from them for the first 20-30 hours of gameplay with no option to fight. Almost like cliffracers, only impossible to defeat. And most importantly I know Bethesda good enough to know that they won't do it that way. They don't want the player to run away all the time and they certainly don't want the player to wait dozens of hours before he can actually fight a dragon. But we'll see. I hope for option 1 with greatly reduced dragon encounters so they'll only attack you on rare occasions (but you may still see them flying by or attack other people, cities etc more often).

Well they can add cliffracers and dragonlings as low level flying enemies so player can train how deal with flying enemies
Dragons can generate in certain areas, instead of random generation everywhere and will work as dangerous limit guards for this area until player will powerful enough to fight them.
Dragons can be not so aggressive and don't attack always or attack only in certain agro radius.
Dargons may spawn only after certain stage in MQ.

Did no one watch the most recent interview? He said they will ramp up with the main quest.

They are designed to be devilishly hard, but epic.

The Deathclaws in Fallout: New Vegas were scary as hell.

Just recently I managed to travel North through Sloan on my level 1 character, just to see if I could, and made it to New Vegas. At one point i'm on a ledge with about 4 Deathclaws surrounding me and binoculars in my hand. My cousin said I should equip my 9mm. I told her there wouldn't be a point. If one of them saw me i'd already be dead.

Now, later on i'd like to be a more formidable against a Dragon in a fight but at level 1 or even level 10, I want to fear for my life.

Deathclaws are so easy to kill. Bean bag rounds ftw. I hope that the dragons don't have a similar weakness.

From what I've read dragons will be a fun fight in my opinion, although all my characters usually involve being stealthy, not sure how I'll pull that off when fighting dragons but I'm sure it'll involve using a lot of dragon shouts/dodging.

Well they compared the dragons to the big daddies, and probably will be around the same difficulty. The big daddies were hard, but fair hard; you can beat them as long as you think clearly about how to enter the fight

I have this distinct (and cinematic) fear with dragons...That I will be walking along some cliff wall or something, tracking some creature (a dragon perhaps) and silently to my right a dragon just sticks his head out of some crevice and *insta-char sneak attack damage X3 on me*

Oblivion gates with wings that is. It's like cliff racer with 100x health and 1000x annoyance. But on the other hand, I want dragons to be really tough, so I think we have a problem here.

If Beth doesn't come up with some miraculous solution to this problem, I really hope that dragon encounters in the wilderness are very rare at least until you start the main quest. After you start the main quest it is obvious that you have to put up with dragons cause you chose to deal with them, but until you do this, lets keep the dragons more like rumors of a distant threat ("omg, I heard that dragons are coming but haven't seen them").

Before starting the main quest I wouldn't mind running into couple of dragons in caves or dungeons as bosses, but I really don't care running into them in the wild, open air too often. I think that couple of encounters will be fun, but after that it will start feeling like the main quest is forced upon you. Sure, you don't have to do the main quest, but if you don't, you have to put up with cliff racers from hell constantly attacking you from the sky.

Don't know why people compare them to Oblivion gates. You usually needed at least 20 minutes to finish one, while a dragon battle shouldn't take longer than5 or 10 minutes.

I think at lower levels we might hope it chokes to death on our burnt body....

I found new vegas' deathlcaws very refreshing from the usual modern RPG that doesn't let you get owned by enemies.

They are the boss fights so they usually will be difficult. Hopefully fun though as well, but I trust they will be.

Another way to kill deathclaws in NV is with a good melee weapon, like the fire axe, and with the perk that lets you knock back opponents you just bash them. They go flying around as you beat it to death. Kind of like training for a dragon fight, though I doubt you could knock back a dragon. I wonder if the unrelenting force shout even knocks dragons back. Doesn't seem to do anything in the trailer..