Sorry for the late reply. You don't have to respond if you don't want to, the conversation seems more or less wrapped up, but still a lot of it seemed worthy of response.
I meant magic in the mechanical gameplay sense. Tamriel in general is inherently magical. It's not just another way to skin a cat as was depicted for example(and quite unfortunately) in the teso trailer, where the mage, warrior and thief archetypes basically did the exact same thing with different tools. Logically, and in game, magic, the bow, the sword, etc, are not just variations of the exact same tool, but different tools in their own right, typically heavily associated with vastly different paths, with magic, from my understanding, being the most esoteric, non intuitive complex and rewarding in the long run.
At present in the games timeline, yes, and it is even commercialised, almost dangerously so at times, like in the story of feyfolken.
The problem here is that we are talking about something that is inconsistently defined at best and unexplained at worst. The lore itself appears to be the most consistent thing in the games, so I view that as slightly more canon than the games representations themselves, and in both cases it is commonly shown that willpower and intelligence determine ones capacity to use magic. Lore like the 2920 series provide several examples of some people being more or less adept at magical use, and one example seemed to present magical use as something similar to the way the force is used in the starwars universe.
In fact, I would say that "the force" and "magic" could be viewed as very similar and have been treated quite similarly by the series in general. The force is simply "stronger" in some individuals and races.
Probably. Depending on the timeline. The mages guild history does make it clear that there was a time when magic was, very, very, very esoteric, implying a non-intuitive nature to magic, to some extent (to take the altmer nature and the nature of nordic voice into consideration)
Personally, I like the idea of this and would like to see a game take place very far back in time, before red mountain, before the mages guild, back when the dwarves existed and the nords were still semi literate thu'um using savages. Seeking out and talking to mages, assuming they are even friendly, could be a questline in itself.
I think it is more a question of the extent to which they could use magic. The magical use was inherent to their success to my knowledge and if you were to factor out the magic part, they wouldn't be particularly impressive. Studied eccentrics at best perhaps?
To return to my main (and most important point), I still feel that magic is different to the path of the thief or the warrior (I would argue that 'the lord' is also an archetype covering, money, politics and speechcraft) in that there doesn't seem to be a ceiling to its possibilities as yet represented in the game, whereas the power bottlenecks of other playstyles, while spectacular, comes relatively quick. In both lore and in gameplay, if you want to be the best you can be, with the strongest grasp of things as possible, you need to take up the magical path.
With this in mind, if it were to be recognised, which I feel it should be, I would hope that magic should be represented as such but with the highest levels of magical power being only accessible through great and complicated in-game effort, rather than simply castrating it in a ham fisted way to accommodate for gameplay "balance".
For the sake of discussion, how should we define a mage? an extensive magic user or one who specialises in magic?
Yeah, aptitude, acquisition and implementation could do with more revision.
It's a question of paths and extents. You could view everything as a shade of magic and everyone interacting with the universe as a mage by default, but then the "mages" we write about would simply be practicioners of 'higher' magic.
The question I am posing, somewhat rhetorically, is , how high does magic go exactly?
The math comparison is a pretty good way of looking at it I think. There is a missing link to the subject, so we cannot really be too objective here but, while mortals are magical and magic use is nearly universally possible, it is not very intuitive nor particularly easy to grasp. It's possible to get through life without much mathematical and scientific knowledge, but, it's pretty hard to get around picking it up if you want to really be the best you can be and understand yourself and the universe and I feel it is the same for magic in tes.
Magic is not just a glowing screwdriver, it's a seemingly nigh infinite toolkit of possibilities. It would be nice to see it more represented as such.