I'm really hoping fences being necessary will be gone entirely in Skyrim. It made no sense that a merchant would ever be able to tell a stolen iron short sword from an owned one. Things of extremely high value should depend on how famous/rich your character is, as a poor unknown wanderer with extremely valuable items might raise suspicion (some of the time), and unique items that were known to belong to certain people or factions should be harder to get gold for as well.

Part of the benefit of fences in Oblivion is not so much immersive realism, but as a practical way to prevent you from stealing everyone blind and immediately becoming rich at a very low level.

I think in general the item purchase prices in Oblivion were far too low and resell prices far too high, even for non-stolen items, making it far too easy to become rich.

Hopefully the fencing and general pricing system will be completely revamped, but I assume that I will still need to install some sort of mod to make all the prices much more expensive (and resell prices very low).

I imagine the devs will want to make the game more accessible to some casual gamers who would have a really difficult time if everything was very expensive. When you become too rich too easily the game becomes much less challenging and less fun IMO.

Again, the problem was not so much the ability to get rich by selling tons of stolen goods. The problem was that it was so easy to steal tons of stuff. The balance for the stealth/thievery aspect of the game should come from making the stealth/thievery aspect difficult, not from tacking on some arbitrary restrictions on how you could sell your collections.

Good ideia.

I agree that the pricing system and looting needs a serious overhaul. Just looting the tons of deadric items from bandits in dungeons is enough to net you close to 200K gold in no time, that really ruins the fun of finding good stuff to sell when it's everywhere. Petty items should be stolen to net you a good hundred or two gold to get by with, and good items should be discovered more rarely, like in the back rooms of castles full of guards or deepest part of dungeons. It ruins the fun when every bandit and their moms are decked out with the best armor and weapons and the supposedly rich characters (mansion owners, lords, and counts) have nothing but petty crap to steal (steal swords and leather armor, maybe a gold nugget and a topaz ring.). What's the point of being a thief if I can just kill bandits and make 10K gold in one looting run? This needs fixing.

I like the Idea of independent thievery getting you in trouble with the thieves guild (if there is one). When Amusei was doing it, it sure got there attention and you had to go steal something back from him, and they later excepted him too. I'm thinking independent thievery, if you fence enough on your own, would get the guild's attention and they'll send an agent to offer you membership to stop your solo thievery which they frown on. Nothing like send thieves guild assassins, I liked their no killing missions, they where fun and challenging.

Last thing. Though it's a good idea if done right, I think my idea of crooked store owners as poor quality fences would be better than just stealing jumping town and selling to another honest merchant. That would thieving way too easy and make it way too easy to get tons of gold at an early level.

Surely an item is only 'hot' if the guards have been alerted of a theft, if this is the case then items stolen in one city can be sold in a different one, the news having not travelled that far (or not being significant enough i.e. potato). For special items, or ones stolen from mayors, guild-leaders etc. The stolen items description will travel to towns and cities in a certain circumference around the place. Eventually this 'heat' will drop off and the item can be sold anywhere apart from the city it was stolen from ( for the aforesaid special items).
Maybe people who you have stolen things from who have the means can send mercenaries out to track you, or the item, down - you move an item along, return to the fence or merchant later and find them dead and the item missing.

On the subject of difficulty, i believe that thievery should be more difficult. People in shacks with few valuables should be easy to steal from, for low return obviously. As you move up the ladder locks become more difficult, guards are employed, dogs, traps and magic alarms on chests. If you try to go back to the shack the locks will again have got more difficult, and spend to much time in one settlement and eventually you will be called in for questions or at least asked a few loaded questions by the local populace. It would mean having to rob-move and sell-rob some more-move and sell, avoid some mercs sent to hunt you down, lay low in a village- rob-move etc.