Much as I love Skyrim, it is influential in that it impressed a lot of people with its numbers for an RPG. It's not really innovative, however, so I wouldn't call it ahead of its time or revolutionary. Its popularity probably tapped into some gamer fatigue with copy-paste FPS games, the hybridization of games to have broader appeal, Viking cool and nerd cool which is coinciding with the popularity of the LOTR movies and now Game of Thrones, and just the snowball effect of the IP being well established.

It's fortuitous for those of us who like open-world RPGs, because Skyrim probably influenced several other upcoming games to adopt open world aspects. I'm super excited about Witcher 3 doing so, for instance.

Even if that's true, I'm not sure what it has to do with Skyrim being "ahead of its time". If anything, all it shows is that mainstream gamers were ready for a massive open world RPG.

Unless you think that the first game of its genre to achieve widespread commercial success is always "ahead of its time". But I don't think that's what most people mean by that phrase, which is why most people are talking about game design and mechanics.