Artifacts shouldn't be some ultra-powered win button.
I actually use the artifacts from Oblivion and syrim, becuase they dont break the game.
Then what's the point in them being artifacts? You read about them in books, learning that they're items of immense power, so it's a major letdown when you actually discover them, see just how mediocre they really are, and throw them into storage.
Honestly, they should be an ultra-powered win button. If that's how they're described, that's how they should be. It's one thing to scale down the population of a city from 30,000 to 30, but to throw handicaps on artifacts for the sake of balance in an unbalanced world doesn't really seem worth the effort.
@arnier, exactly. Another one that comes to mind is the Gauldur Amulet. That really pissed me off.