1. Level Scaling
Level scaling isn't inherently a bad thing. I mean there were levelled lists in Morrowind, and most people were barely aware that Ordinators and guards were scaled to their level. It isn't a problem, because it didn't interfere with the game at all. The big problem people had with level scaling is in Oblivion, when it came in HARD. It wasn't subtle, it was bull-headed and as obvious as obvious as a Suranese [censored]house in Weynon priory. You'd hit a certain level and suddenly your average bandit came dancing in with daedric armour. As a result you felt like there was no progression. You were never going to find the great armour or weapons, and by the time you did everybody had them anyway. When you hit level 40, fur armour was harder to find than a White Guar. It's much, MUCH less obvious in Skyrim in terms of bandits. Although I've been subjected to the odd Dunmer-in-Ebony-armour random encounter while on an evening stroll, I don't feel like I'm fighting an army of Divayth Fyrs in every camp. That being said, I'm still subjected to the same ugly level scaling that was present in Oblivion in Skyrim in terms of loot. The enemies scale a tiny bit better than they did in Oblivion, but it's still obvious. I've never walked into a cave filled with Dragon Priests at level 1. And when I fight through a cave of draugr and get to the beautiful ornamental chest at the end, I'm still subjected to it filled with 52 gold and a potion of stamina.
The main difference between Morrowind compared to Skyrim and Oblivion is that in Morrowind the areas are all done by hand. Sure, the ancestral tombs might all feel the same, but there's a sense of pride when you find the arrows behind Thirsk, or the Mentor's Ring, or the Sword of White Woe in Balmora. In Skyrim and Oblivion there's none of that. The dungeons are very impressive in Skyrim to be sure, but they're filled with procedurally generated lifeless NPCs and rewards. I can certainly understand the technical difficulties of doing this. Morrowind even had the advantage of having a huge area on the map that you might aswell have just called "Don't-go-here-land". When I pick up my maps of Cyrodiil or Skyrim I've never looked at them and thought "That place was a real ass to finish", and I played on the hardest difficulty. Standing back and looking at it, it isn't that much of a problem. I mean there isn't any REAL problem with NPCs in a cave being nameless, it's unnecessary. They're just filler, you kill them and move on. But when you look at TES as a whole, it has a benefit that (since the fall of the Gothic series into mediocrity) no other RPG series on the market has. The main selling point of TES is exploration. It's open world. You can go in and do whatever you want. The problem with level scaling introduced in a way it was in Oblivion and Skyrim makes that point moot, however. There's never any point to exploring because you will never, ever find anything special. The cases where this isn't so are few and far between. Knevel the Tongue, the Legend of Red Eagle and the Gauldur amulet fragments being the most obvious examples. It's those examples that deserve to be cherished and welcomed. Silenced Tongues isn't that deep a quest, I won't try and make that claim. You go in, kill the bad guy, take his fancy swords. But it's things like that make exploring actually fun. The developers put this fun little part in a dungeon that you wouldn't otherwise find unless you WERE exploring and it's unique, it's different, it reminds you why you started exploring in the first place.
One of the things Bethesda tried to do was give people incentive to explore to find new shouts. It's one of the parts of Skyrim I liked. The walls weren't randomized, that particular shout was placed in that particular dungeon. It's a great feeling to go into a cave and find something that maybe nobody else whose played Skyrim has found yet. Like "Oh sure, everyone has killed some draugr here and there, but I've found the Tomb and Helm of Yngol." It's that sense of discovery like something out of Jules Verne. It's that something that level scaling kills. The Pale Lady in Frostmere crypt might just be another Wisp Mother, but it's something that has depth. In the context of an RPG, imagination is king. It breathes life into the adventure, creates backstories for the people you meet, but it's infinitely harder to do that when NPCs feel, look, ACT generated and lifeless.
I'm not saying Morrowind didn't have this problem. But the people were always named, you could always imagine stories. You'd stumble upon threads of the webspinner all the time. People like Umbra waiting for death north of Suran. Sorkvild's tower next to Dagon Fel. You'd free slaves or help escaped slaves just because you thought it was right, and then you find out about the Twin Lamps. Vampires had to stick together, because they couldn't talk to anyone else. But in Skyrim there's frightfully few random encounters of significance. I mean truly scripted encounters that aren't necessarily thought through, but things that are there just because the player deserves better than a randomly generated reward after fighting their way through hordes of Falmer. With Skyrim they really tried to alleviate this problem with daedric quests however, and it turned out great. You'd meet Barbas on a road somewhere, or shrines out in the middle of nowhere.