At first I was pretty upset about it - the removal of spellcrafting that is. After discussing it here on the forums I was pacified by the claim that no spellcrafting would allow for interesting new spells like: flamethrower hands, and runes, and that sort of thing. Clearly - it was said - these spell effects would be completely incompatible with a spell creation system.

Well now that we've all seen the new magic in action, I'm very sad to say that I was right to be angered at spellcrafting's removal. Sure the new flamethrower spell is a new addition to TES, I'll grant you that. In fact it's frickin' awesome! And I think you're absolutely correct that adding new spells like this will move us away from the stale "spreadsheet-y" feel that was permeated the magic system in Oblivion. However, I took a few seconds to pause Skyrim demo video number 2 and take a look at the description of that spell in particular.

It clearly lists a damage figure of 75. So the numbers are still there, as I knew they would be. After all, one needs to have such a number in order to get some idea of how effective the spell will be against an opponents health (which also uses numbers, which are also present in spreadsheets most of the time).

Nothing has really changed then. While there may be awesome new spell effects, which I wouldn't give up for anything, there are still numbers in the magic system. The only real difference as far as the numbers go is that now they're sealed off, and we can't mess with them in-game - I'm assuming that they didn't use magic constants in their code (numbers written directly into the code without associating those numbers with a variable. If they did then :facepalm:), and if so then it would be very, very easy to make them modifiable. So no arguments about the difficulty of implementing such a system please.

Does this resonate with anyone? Or are there still people out there who think that being able to customize your spells would make the game too ?

Yes, I agree, there is no point on saying that spellmaking was removed for a good reason when it does not exclude the current magic system, both can coexist just fine.

It was removed because Bethesda wanted to take magic in a new direction, making spells feel more unique and less like mix and match items(If they pulled off their vision for the new system, that is). The gameplay mechanics have nothing to do with it

As long as the damage scales with your Destruction Skill in some way, I have no complaints. But if it doesn't, then I would definitely agree with you. They might as well just make each skill only 5 points total, instead of 100, and make each point really hard to obtain. Because all this is, is a tier system.

This whole streamline argument is starting to get tiresome, because by the time they get to TES VI, they might just say that "one-handed and two-handed are redundant", "they pretty much do the same thing", and "We can make this better by merging them". lol... at which point I will lose some faith in them.

At the rate they are going, this series will turn into an Action/Adventure Game... not an RPG.