I second this

I am not sure if I was unclear, but while yes you can grind up any skill it was never pointless before this. If I ground up heavy armor I got good at heavy armor so it had a point, now there is no point unless you put perks in it. A grind with purpose is not bad a pointless grind is just flat out bad game design. This has effects which are good for the game.

1. People will grind up skills for the sole purpose of improving a totally different skill. and I am sorry that is just moronic.
1A. You may level a skill for purposes other than perks for other skills but just not have the perks to spare to get it up and then your leveling served no purpose what so ever despite you training in the skill and having a numerical representation saying you got better.
2. You will continually see a wide range of skills go up but without the skills actually improving. For example lets say you are playing a sword, shield, heavy armor and smithing character 4 skills to get you to level 50ish. As you level those skills in a roughly even fashion you will see your improvements not go up in a even remotely even fashion. You get small spikes at each level and not the improvement your skills would indicate. Lets say each of those skills goes up by 10 and you get 2 levels, well that is awesome for what 2 skills since they will actually improve but the other 2 skills that supposedly got better show no actual improvement. Or if you decide to put your first 4 perks into one handed, what happened with all that improvement your skills are showing, since you are not actually getting better. If you are going to take out the improvement then just remove the numbers just have the constellations and have the stars light up when they are unlocked. If you are going to keep the numbers, the numbers going up should mean you actually get better so you know improving at something actually is an improvement.

There is nothing wrong with a perk system, there is nothing wrong with the majority of your power coming from perks. There is a lot of things wrong with how bethesda implemented it though.

A couple of the skills actually work like stealth, improving that skill you actually get good at the skill and if you perk it you become phenomenal. That is a good way for the skills to work if you want to have a lot of power come from perks and have a 1 perk per level system. Most of the skills don't work though since they are totally pointless grinds without perks.

It's actually way easier and quicker to become a god in Skyrim than in previous TES games.
And if Beth patches the exploits for enchanting and smithing watch all the power gamers complain.

I fail to see the argument that perks somehow prevent this from happening.
And nGCD for Oblivion was, imho, the best leveling mod in TES series.
;)

While I do think Perks should be a major boost, I think Ranks should also give a proper boost. To all things. Yeah, it needs to balance a few things.