If you're referring to Tonedog's posts (the only posts in this thread I can find that really touch on difficulty), I disagree. I don't think playing with 100 Health and no armor is "the easy way" at all. In fact I think it is, on the whole, harder to play as he does than to play the way some do: enchanting every slot that can hold an enchantment, tempering the best armor and weapons, gulping down five potions at a time and playing on Legendary. Even on Novice you are likely to get killed very fast without armor if you are not paying attention.

I've played, and still play D&D.

I've never understood how killing 50 kobolds helped me level up my lockpicking skill. Killing bears, or gnolls or whatever helps level up my Appraise skill? I'm sorry, but I rather like ES's system of "use the skill, improve the skill". I'm going to improve my smithing skills by making things instead of improving my smithing skills by killing mudcrabs. If I do a lot of bargaining/selling, I'll improve speechcraft. If I want to use axes, using axes makes me get better at it, instead of picking a feat or skill after doing something completely unrelated.

You can attempt to explore everywhere at level one, but you're going to run into enemies stronger than you. Not everything scales.

The thing I love about Skyrim is that I can go all over at low levels and not necessarily get roflstomped. You still gotta be careful sometimes, but it's freedom, and you can go wherever and get the same amount of experience. You don't abandon an area because the mobs are all gray to you.

And I'd absolutely hate to be stuck in an area grinding until it's safe for me to proceed to the next one.