Skyrim has a lot of silly bugs like this. Another reason that makes me believe the game was rushed without proper QA.

One of my favorite quest bugs happened when I entered a random fort. I fought my way through the fort and when I arrived at the courtyard there was a lever that opened the main gate to the fort. I activated it and left the fort through the main gate. Afterwards I found a camp outside the fort with three guys hanging around. One of them told me that his fort was taken over by bandits and he asked me to help him. Yes, sure, I said. So he told me to open the gate of the fort by activating a lever in the courtyard. Well, obviously I just opened the gate with said lever. But dialogue options? Nope. So I had to tell him that I would do the job (a job I had already done, but whatever). Then I had to walk through the whole fort again (directly going to the lever didn't work as that was not my current quest objective). When I arrived at the lever I activated it and closed the main gate. Funnily enough the three guys magically appeared inside the fort even though the main gate was closed now and thanked me for liberating the fort for them. :facepalm:

Huh? I tried this and it didn't work for me. Specifically Quintis didn't give me an option to turn in when I spoke to him. I'll try it again tonight, but I'm not holding out much hope.

Thanks.

Indeed. The three glitches that I mentioned in the OP were of the major variety though this kind of glitch that just makes you do something inefficiently or hinders you are super irritating though not game-breaking, or erm...excuse me "quest breaking," lol. I have found dozens of these. Most recently I couldn't rename my weapons so instead of walking around with badass swords named Siphon and Leech I have Daedric Sword (Legendary) and Daedric Sword (Legendary). Waiting in front of shops for them to open also causes an irritating glitch where they are still locked after the waiting period is over. I have had situations where I saw something a merchant had that I really wanted but couldn't aford but by the time I walked across town to sell off some of my inventory their entire inventory had changed. Not just the single item which might make sense from a roleplaying perspective. I.E. someone else beat me to it, but the entire inventory, every single item had been turned over in a matter of minutes. You can also exploit the game by saving, killing a merchant and reloading your last save to reset their inventory, though I have not tried.

All of the above are just examples of sloppy rushed design to get this game on the shelves by Christmas. It is like they are saying to their fans "We know you are stupid enough to keep playing this trash no matter how many bugs there are so why try to release a good final product the first time. We'll fix it when we're good and ready." The counter-example that I usually reference is Blizzard's approach to quality. Can you concieve of a Blizzard game being released with such glaring bugs? Hardly. Even World of Warcraft (which is infinitely more cumbersome that TES since it requires constant updating) is less buggy than this piece of crap and they have to actually maintain it in the cloud. Diablo III will be perfect when it is released because it has been in development since before a generous portion of it's target audience was born. Get it right the first time Bethesda or don't do it at all.

You've collected the other two quest items as well eh and you've got all three in your inventory? I can imagine that dialog option might hinge upon seeing the three items actually in your inventory rather then just what section of the quest you're set to. For what its worth I also had to scroll down his dialog options a notch to see the quest turn-in one too, perhaps that's it?

It most be location specific because I've put all my briarhearts into a container at Breezhome and only recently completed this quest at level 50. I didn't go to the location on the map to get the briarheart, just went home and took one out of storage. I've encountered similar issues with the miscellaneous quests and fixed them with the console. There is good info at the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Wiki on how to fix them. The Wikia site is what Google usually lists first but I've found it less useful.

I don't remember if I scrolled down or not. This may very well be the problem. I will check and update this afternoon

Well, oddly enough when I input the code this time (setstage MS12b 60) it worked. I did not have to scroll down either since it was the second option from the top. I have no idea why I was successful this time, but apparently this is the fix to this glitch.

My position, however, remains the same. The tedium that I had to endure to get through this quest was bloody ridiculous and these errors should not exist in a game that I paid $60 to own. Hopefully subsequent patches will fix this but I would have much preferred that they had done a raffle for beta keys and had spent enough time testing the game that I do not have to run into a glitch of some sort every half-hour.

Thanks to everyone who helped and a big middle-finger to everyone else who wasted my time lecturing me on why I should lower my expectations and accept an inferior product.

They really shouldn't turn common items into quest items, and when they do they should let you drop it anyway.

I still have two amulets of Talos I can't get rid of because of that stupid minor quest in Markarth that I don't want to finish.

3. Collect underpants

Definitely. This could have been prevented had they made the quest item a unique item.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Repairing_the_Phial I used the setstage command as noted "setstage MS12b 60", minus quotes of course. This was the only fix.

Unfortunately there are a huge amount of quest item bugs that will cause a similar problem. It's too easy to pick up quest items prior to getting a quest for them, and it does not recognize and auto update when you get the quest like it did in Oblivion when you have the item already in inventory. Plus, quest items having weight now just adds to the fun. For quest books for the College of Winterhold, it seems that you can console command drop the book, and then pick it up from the ground to update the quest properly.

have you tried giving him the briar heart?

Seems that we have a morrowindish bug here. In morrowind, if you stole, say.. a diamond. From that time forward, EVERY diamond would be considered stolen. Now, in Skyrim, if you have a quest item, EVERY one of that item is considered a quest item. Not to mention quest items you can't drop, even after the quest is complete.