When I read that Skyrim was swapping out Blade and Blunt skills for one-handed and two-handed weapon skills, it occurred to me immediately that this was reasonable and logical. After all, fighting with a claymore is certainly more similar to fighting with battleaxe than it is to fighting with a dagger. And fighting with a mace is certainly more similar to using a longsword than it is to using a huge maul. Amirite?

It occurred to me that this could be implemented in Oblivion by changing the names and descriptions of the skills, perks, and so on. I've actually made an experimental ESP that does this most basic part of the job. I set up Blunt as "two-handed" and Blade as "one-handed". The next step is simpler but much more time consuming: All type "onehandblunt" weapons in CS need to be reclassified as "onehandblade", and "twohandblade" weapons have to be reclassified as "twohandblunt".

At this point you have functionally duplicated the advertised Skyrim system.

The trouble comes in a heavily modded game. Patching for this would have to be a nightmare - in order to make sure that no other mods changes to weapon stats, models, etc., were overwritten, while the change in weapon type was implemented without fail, you'd basically have to patch every file that adds or alters weapons. Certainly this could be done, but it's a whole lot of work for one person. I estimate that just doing it in my own game, in the simplest possible way (directly editing with TES4EDIT rather than making patches) would take 15-20 hours of my time - I have about 300 mods in total.

It seems like this should be simpler. It occurred to me that this could be implemented as a Bashed Patch tweak, and I've already put in a suggestion/feature request with them. But does anyone have any other ideas or expertise to offer? How would YOU do it?

Patching all the weapons seen and to be seen simply doesn't make this idea worth it IMO, even with a bashed patch it would probably make it grow over 100 MB. Plus, you'll run into issues if a mod is expecting a blade and finds a blunt (renamed to 1 handed or whatever) for its script checks, and lots of stuff I can't even imagine now (weapon sounds are hardcoded, you have the blade sounds and blunt sounds, 1-handed would get ones and 2-handed the others, NPCs skills would make them have mismatched weapons in a lot of situations, etc).
Oblivion was designed the way it was designed, and fighting against such a base design choice is futile at best.
BUT there might be ways with OBSE, though i can't remember anything having to do with this, I recall something about changing the skill type of a weapon to things as weird as having a blade train your hand to hand, but I'm probably wrong.