So, why are you playing TES? Ability with the keyboard was always the perquisite for surviving combat, after all, and became more important with every iteration. For that matter, few people enjoyed stealth in Dagerfall and Morrowind when it was "all about character" and based only on skills and dice-rolls.
Non-combat content should be similarly interactive. Lock-picking system in Fallout 3 was quite good, IMHO, they should just borrow it.
Daggerfall and Morrowind were, and still are, the most popular TES games to date. Please don't go posting game sales as a stat to say otherwise, game sales having nothing to do with how good a game is.
Stealth in Oblivion was much better, but it factored in your stealth ability as well. The lockpicking in Oblivion was based on your ability with the game pad, or keyboard. That is why you could lock pick any kind of lock no matter what your skill was. It was broken beyond fixing. Combat in Oblivion was dependent on your skill and the weapon you chose and those things determined how much damage you did, which is that is not a minigame and why I have no problems with the combat in Oblivion.
Minigames like locking picking and persuasion, in Oblivion, were failures. The Skeleton Key was also a failure and broke the lock picking even more, since you had a key that never broke.
You want interactive, there are playing of FPS games that are very interactive. RPG's are no supposed to be interactive in that way. They are supposed to be based on your character skill only, hence the acroynm RPG (Role Playing Game).