and is actually going to use perks to add more diversity between characters where previously they used skills. That's something worth being concerned over.

I'm not going to belabor the point any more, but I really would like to see Speedy McChainedtotheground's "character sheet," if you will.

Not to mention I go farther than just using a skill. Some of my characters only use one thing from a certain skill. I also never try to overlap skills. Example; my beguiling Imperial Vamp Baron Irelo, and my Argonian Witch-Doctor Shadow-Comes-Inside both use Illusion, but they use it differently and with different spells. In Fallout for example, I have 7 serious role-plays and none of them use an "overlapping weapon".

This is really what we need to be focusing on. We have to stop arguing about whether or not less skills has to mean less diversity of possible characters - it most definitely does not. What we should really be focused on is whether Bethesda is actually going to do this properly, and is actually going to use perks to add more diversity between characters where previously they used skills. That's something worth being concerned over.

...

Doesn't that solve your problem?

Untrue. Every skill in Oblivion had four perks, and each of those perks had some significant impact on the game, which is quite a bit better than Morrowind's approach with the skills. The issues there were more with how the skills were used by the actual gameplay systems (overly aggressive leveling, simplistic combat, and a few simple exploits made a lot of them more or less irrelevant), but the skills themselves were considerably better-developed and more complex as a result, and in some cases (archery) losing the other skills allowed them to make pretty clear improvements to the system that the remaining skill used.

We didn't "effectively get less". We effectively got something different. You didn't like that something, but that absolutely doesn't mean that it's something less.

Okay, this can't keep going, it's getting ridiculous. Please, please EXPLAIN how you would make a character build that relies on the character being able to run fast but not jump high as a major element of his character in this series. Please. Don't give a vague response. Don't give a response implying that it's because you're losing skills, or say something like "because it is". Don't talk about it in terms of how it's going to impact game design, because we're talking about character builds in terms of roleplaying here. Now... explain.

Who told you this had to be a major element? It doesn't have to be major to be important.

Also doesn't really respond to what I was asking in even the remotest sense.