-People do everything FOR A REASON. People are reasonable. Therefore, if you steal in real life, you have 99% of the time have the reason for such action. Pick pocketing in SKyrim does not add value to anything. THere are no unique items to steal. There are no things to steal, that you cant get normally. There are no important quests that you cant do without investing into pickpocketing. Gold is very easy to come by. If prices were VERY HIGH, there would be at least ONE reason. As there are no reason to invest in Pickpocketing, most do not put points in there. As people who dont put points into Pickpocketing - and then put their remaining skills into Combat/Crafting, they are called power-gamers. Stats have no influence here. Just there's no REASON to invest there. The stealing is shallow, you can get everything without.
-Speech. There are no situations where this skill would have any meaning. There are no situations where you would NEED speech. For example, if Master mode would create a situation where every merchant in the world has only 50 gold for bartering, THERE WOULD BE AT LEAST ONE REASON. Speech skills dont impact game in any way. For example, Combat skills HAVE impact on the game. Therefore, people trying to reason put their points there.
-Lockpicking. I wont comment on that at all.
-Crafting skills. Now, why is it considered cheating or unreasonable play? it's completely the opposite. It GIVES meaning to things you do. You can craft weapons. You can craft potions. You can enchant items. All those things you actually USE in the game and see how they impact the world. Designers intended crafting. Crafting has value to add to your character. If pickpocket, speech and lockpicking would have ANY value whatsoever, a single reason, a single lock or unique item that you could open or steal, and you couldnt do that in any other way, THESE skills would be on par with everything else.
-The random loot in skyrim. It is bad. Why would you want any of the loot that is inferior to what you can make yourself. Now if there was an opposite thing - if you could randomly get loot better than you could craft (that could also mean that crafting would be much worse than now), there would be incentive to not craft and just play the lottery of drops.
Now, even the people who want to roleplay- they want to have value in their actions, that shapes the world. They do not want to see statistics, or power-level their damage output. However, there are no options to add value in having those skills, in Skyrim. Therefore, they pick combat and crafting skills. They dont intend to do the "power-gaming", but there is no reason to do otherwise. They WANT to have such reason, therefore they offer their changes.
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