You should make an elaborate post detailing your position in the TES General section of the forum. I reckon it can be an interesting discussion about the relative importance of world building and story telling versus the mechanics and the gameplay.
Right now however I don't feel terribly motivated to dissect various games with both strong stories and gameplay. By posting without any sort of argument to your position you come off as a piss-poor troll.
OK, I'll elaborate. It's a game, not a book. The story and lore fleshes it out, but it is the mechanics that makes or breaks a game. Early games had little or no story at all; after all, an Arcade usually doesn't have much of a story outside of an occasional explanation of the backstory between the title screen and the high scores. Even so, there were many great games with great stories, but they were remembered as being great because of the mechanics.
TES IV achieved generally higher scores than TES III, most likely due to the graphics and the improved gameplay even though the latter seems to be more popular on these forums. I'm not saying one is better than the other, necessarily, but as I said before, it's not a novel, it's a game.
Edit: Likewise, Mithril was a gameplay issue. In vanilla Morrowind, there was a huge gap between light armors. On one side, you had leather, netch leather, nordic fur, and chitin. Then you had glass. In Bloodmoon and Tribunal, filler armors, namely Dark Brotherhood, Wolf, and Snow Wolf were introduced, but such armors could not be standard fare in Cyrodiil. Integrating chainmail into Light Armor somewhat helped, but they needed something more to fill the gap. Hence Elven and Mithril were chosen. It is unfortunate that they could not introduce it as gameplay lore, but they did a pretty good job depicting Elven as related to Alyeid.