Considering this, I find myself tempted by the arguments that, you can walk through the game, because the game lets you be exactly what you aimed to be. Powerful in respect to the challenges presented.
In the evolution of gaming as I have watched it develop, started with the simple concept that death equalled failure. If you could not beat the boss, you died, and in Ninja Gaiden, Mega Man, Streets of Rage, this is an unavoidable fact. The game is designed to punish you for failure, and we are fooled by this concept that death equals difficulty. and having to retread paths already walked as our due punishment for not being good enough, is our due, and our reward is to face those challenges.
As games evolve, and we see quick save, and numerous other measures that remove the punishments inflicted, we have to consider that frustration is the core to our gaming experience is not the true definition. Whilst some games retain this core value, difficulty is often measured by other, less intrusive punishments for our failure.
Sonic the Hedgehog was never a particularly challenging game, but still had this core concept of limited lives to enforce the longevity of a game in terms of its difficulty, instead opting to offer optional challenges that the player inflicts on themselves to challenge. We challenged each other to fastest times, collecting all the gems, 100% on coins.. where did we go wrong and ask Sonic to inflict "Master Super Difficulty".
With the addition of complexity to a game like Skyrim, we forget this important lesson that its the optional challenges that stood true gamers from those that feel that completing the game is a measure of their worth, and the challenge of the game. Its sheer modern laziness that demands the developer hands us the challenge, and we must overcome it. Yet so much of gaming history demanded that true "elite" worth was based upon the optional challenges the gamer imposed on themselves.
To finally land on my point. Skyrim is not defined in its physical difficulty on the hardest setting, but rather in the restrictions, you the player optionally choose to make the game difficult. With a massive optional world its easy to lose sight that these options are there to entirely down to player choice, rather than a set of developer imposed restrictions such as difficulty level to hold your hand and tell you, "Well Done".
I am surely, not alone in being a long term gamer who recognises that there is rarely any great value in completing a game, but often in the manner in which it was completed.
So if it means, playing the game as a paladin, who would refuse to wear daedric armour, or to save the world as a coward who refuses to kill a living thing, or to fight without swords, or to do so as a merchant with skills far removed from fights, have a greater badge of honour upon completion than to sit with "Master" difficulty and design optimal damage per second.. you missed the point.
Skyrim gave you a world, and its not even a balanced world, but it gave you the freedom to define your difficulty through actions, and to dismiss this as "artificial restriction" loses the point that this is a game for playing roles. To artificially hold your hand and tell you what a challenge is, defeats the reasoning behind the whole concept.
Step outside the box, do something special, choose a way of playing that deserves respect, because beating a questline on hard difficulty.. not that special. Do it with Conan bearing a two handed sword, too stupid to learn enchanting, and refusal to wear armour even thou, even in Conans world its perfectly available. I'll listen and applaud.
Stop asking developers to spoon feed you your challenge and define it yourself. It worked for the rest of the series.. why demand spoon feeding now? Hasn't spoonfeeding done enough to damage the series credibility?