In Oblivion gold was so hard to get. You had to do quests and fight hard enemies. I think Skyrim should have rich merchants like Creeper and the Mudcrab merchant who have lots of money and buy anything at full price. Also, there should be large deposits of gold hidden for people to find it if they come across it.
In both Morrowind and Oblivion, gold was hard to get for the first couple of levels, and until you figured out where everything was and how the game worked (or didn't work). After that, it was hard to avoid getting too much of it.
As for "fight hard enemies", what game were you playing? In OB, all of the enemies were levelled and scaled to present the same "marginal" degree of challenge, no matter what you did or where you went. They were "medium difficulty" throughout the game, unless you didn't play "the levelling game" properly and got weaker compared to your opponents, instead of stronger, as the game went on. Compare that to MW, where there were enemies at the start that were easy and others that would tear you to pieces without breaking a sweat, until you reached a high enough level that you could just about slaughter them with a casual flick of your sword-arm, and everything became way too easy.
Creeper and Mudcrab needed to go, or at least not be available until high level, when the gold really doesn't matter any more, and they just become a convenient way to dump off high-priced items more quickly. I don't use them in my games until I've already got at least 100,000 gold to spare, and money is irrelevant. On the other hand, the ability to barter, as all merchants did in Morrowind (including Creeper and Mudcrab, to a VERY limited degree), was sorely missed in OB. Having a merchant with unlimited quantities of gold, but unwilling to spend more than 600 of it on any single item, made no sense in OB. In MW, the Merchant had a fixed limit that renewed overnight, and you could gradually work around that by bartering with gradually more and more expensive items, to the point where you could sell just about anything, but it might take a week or more. It worked and felt more like a "barter economy". After a while, mid level items became "change" for buying and selling high-value ones.
Should we place the large deposits of gold right next to the big red "I WIN" button? Maybe we should have a quest marker that points to it, too. Perhaps the OP is right, and gold should be trivially simple to get.....only the Skyrim currency is based on silver, hehe.