Still, what does puzzles or the lack of them have to do with difficulty and character creation?
I don't know about difficulty per se, but I'm glad to see puzzles in all the same:
After the riddles in Arena's dungeons and even the switch hunts in Daggerfall, I'd been hoping that Bethesda would eventually return to dungeon puzzles once they had the manpower to take a more sophisticated approach. Copying patterns off of a quest item doesn't sound like anything particularly profound, but I'm sure there'll be even more complex puzzles and it'd be cool if there were dungeons where you had to, say, remove the correct book from a shelf and then copy its pattern. Something in order to make the pace of dungeons slightly less linear and give you a reason to explore a bit more in between fights. :read: