No, the awfulness was how the horses stuck you in 3rd person, were animated terribly, controlled terribly, and inexplicably slowed down the framerate.
And even if all these hings were implemented perfectly, having to dismount every... bleeding... time you had to fight something and usually have the horse and the PC get a few hits while the animation was playing still would have made the Obl implementation awful.
And since I prefer to play low-str characters such as mages, extra carrying capacity in exchange for spending money on a horse would have been very welcome, yes.
Basically, the Obl horses just didn't have any benefits. While riding, athletics wouldn't rise, you had to dismount all the time to fight, no extra carrying capacity and keeping them alive and finding one's way back to them was tricky. Who would want something like this, again? Riding a horse was like one never-ending escort quest!