I'm not sure if i'm missing some lore or something, but I feel like the Oblivion Crisis could've been much easier on Cyrodiil(and the whole of Tamriel) if the Imperial Army had done something to help the town guards destroy the gates. I can understand not having a large standing army because of the golden age, but not having one at all? that seems pretty unbelievable, even for The Elder Scrolls.

So, what do you think about this, am I missing some info, or does this make sense?

It's really to just give the player something to do. The game makes you question "Why is everyone so incompetent!" But if NPCs in any game were competent we would have nothing to do.

Oh and the majority of the Legion, to my knowledge, is stationed in the other provinces. So they are stretched thin as it is.

It's actually discussed in-game by some of the counts.

According to Ocato, the Legion was busy helping out the other Provinces and recalling them back to Cyrodiil would have been a bad idea.

Buuuuuut then we got Dragonborn telling us that they did pull troops out and what the hell more plot holes.

Ocato's just the Chancellor, he isn't the Emperor. He could have been overruled. It's also possipbe there were lots of mixed orders going about, with political leaders in Cyrodiil being panicked and calling Legions home, only to be overruled, leaving the Legions in the middle of nowhere with conflicting orders and not able to really help anyone.

I think that, overall, Oblivion does a horrible job of depicting the Oblivion Crisis. Even with something like a siege crawler, sacking a major city takes an army of thousands. The Oblivion Gates weren't just spitting out a handful of Clanfear, they were distorting armies, seemingly at random, all over the place.

I think it was just handled pretty poorly in general, from Oblivion to Skyrim.

I feel like it was largely a case of a disconnect between gameplay and lore. Lorewise, thousands of Daedra poured out of hundreds of gates all over Tamriel, and it took armies to keep them at bay. But for gameplay and performance reasons, the games are drastically scaled down so that "thousands" is closer to "dozens".

But yeah, when I finally spoke to Chancellor Ocato in Oblivion and he talked about leaving the legions in the provinces, I was like "but you didn't! A huge part of Skyrim's setting is based on you abandoning the provinces!". They can be really hit-or-miss sometimes.

By who? Emperor is gone, Heir Apparant hasn't been crowned and is too busy trying to figure a way to get the Amulet of Kings back, most of the Elder Council (IIRC) ran back to ther respective provinces to put out the fires there...

He's basically the only guy in power at that point.

The Elder Council has never seemed to function as a dictorall system, but rather as an advisory to the Emperors, and when the throne is vacant, as a collective governance my body. In that, it's likely a consensus based mechanism (Otherwise the Chancellor would just step up as the new Emperor) with the Chancellor simply being the most respected individual and a public mouthpiece. Similar mechanisms existed both in the Post-Republic Senate in Rome, the Thane Councils of various European medieval nations and even the advisories of various chineese dynasties.