It has occured to me that if I take advantage of the exit to the Imperial Prison Sewers, i can change my character at that point to any of the other races, and re-set the skills the character has. From what I can see - so long as I don't actually go outside of the sewers, it will ask me again and again "Do you really want to be a..." and give me the option to completely change everything about the char - and yet not lose any of the skillpoionts gained by using a variety of exploits while in the sewer tunnels.

Different races have different beginning skills. The High Elves for one have a lot more magicka skills, and also have a bigger bunch of spells they can cast. Various other races have other skills that can be developed up using a wide number of exploits - ALL BEFORE ENTERING THE MAIN GAME WORLD

If you keep the rats and the Goblins in the tunnels alive, you can build up both types of armore, restoration, and so on - although without repair hammers you can only do so much to the armorer skill. Fighting skills such as blade and so on would mean you would eventually wipe out the captive "Trainer Population" so to speak, so there is a limit to that too.

But Illusion, Mysticism, Alteration, Sneak and quite a few other skills you can PRE-BUILD on a character before you even set foot outside in the main game. And no - this does not necessarily mean you will become too powerful, it means you will have advanced skills and the creatures and villains that you contend with will be of a higher order.

As one example - you won't run across a "TIMBER Wolf" until the game detects that you are at a high enough level to deal with it.

~ and so forth...

But if you want to do a lot more right from the start, this presents options that can accellerate the opening game, even though many of the exploits used to ramp up skills are best described as tedious, such as continually sneaking up on - and then sneaking away from - the first Goblin you encounter, who is so focused on cooking a rat that it doesn't even look around if you succeed in stealing the "RAT MEAT" from it...

Well, the problem with your idea is that you'll only have two goblins and three rats to work with, because you can't go back beyond the sewers at the end.