Oh, yeah, I think I meandered off of the original topic of magicka restoration.
I do my best in the mod to try and make it easier to come by. I lowered the effect cost so that potions restore more of it, I made the spoiled potions restore magicka, and if you've got Mysticism as a skill, there's always the absorb magicka spells (which, admittedly, I'll be nerfing a bit in the next update). The only other thing I can think of it perhaps adding a restocking supply of cheap/bargain restore magicka potions to certain vendors. But, I'm not too sure about that one.
I was highly disappointed that I couldn't find a restocking supply of standard restore magicka potions. Those would have been a better investment than some of the spells I bought but never use when I was at a lower level.
By this point in time though, the the exclusive restore magicka potions are more suitable, are affordable, and there is a restocking supply of that available. It's quite a change going from being desperate for money at lower levels, and having to sell soul gems filled with conjured ghosts to make money, to having money practically shooting out of my ears.
So if you added restocking supplies for those, an alternative to alchemy would be buying soul gems, filling them, selling them, then using the money to buy the potions.
Agreed, but why isn't that ever turned around to: it means you have to be craftier than just spamming sword strokes? Not from your post, but I get the impression sometimes that there's this idea that magic is kind of a cheat, and that the way to "fix" that is to force melee combat on mages. To me that seems equivalent to dropping the health on all weapons so that they're useless after 10 strikes, until they're repaired.
Of course, for most characters (anybody who isn't a pure mage), magic IS kind of a cheat, which makes the balancing difficult.
On the subject of spamming sword strokes, when I finally decided to buy the bound dagger spell, my thoughts were basically like "oh god why didn't I do this before, this is awesome" and "it's like mowing the lawn."