Maybe it's a trade-off for lack of alteration lock openers, but it's certainly an 'expensive' one. Is there any reason to rank lockpicking under the assumption you enjoy the mini-game?
On my first character, I was picking Master level locks with a skill of 15 in Lockpicking. With that being said, you can see why I will never put any perk points into lockpicking. Especially when I am hard pressed to fill out my other, more important, skill trees as it is.
I think the lockpicking system is well done in this game, because I did go through 10 or more broken lockpicks just to open those master level locks.