If you ask me Spellmaking was unnecessary.
The only purpose it served was to either make a spell that wasn't as powerful as a stock one, so you could use that in the meantime, or to make a spell that was incredibly powerful and beyond the stock spells offered by the game.
It was probably a nightmare to balance, and the whole thing involved a load of loopholes, so they seem to have just avoided it all by taking it out.
What bugs me is that while spellmaking was removed, they also removed a boat load of stock spells too. That shouldn't have happened.
Really wish there were more options.
Yet they did it perfectly in every past TES game.
"But I could make a 'one-shot-kill-all' spell in former TES games!"
Yes, and chances are at that point you were already so high level it wouldn't have mattered anyway if you got one hit kill spells or just killed your enemies in two successive standard fireballs. Also
there is no need to balance a single player game like that, yes there is a need for challenge but spell making is a feature you can do anything with, it's your choice if you break the game or not with it.
Because here is the crux of the matter, when you opened spell creation the spell creator didn't suddenly take hold of your character and force him to make a spell which abused many layers of weakness spells coupled with damage spells and then took all of your gold away and then overwrote the rest of your spells with one-shot-kill spells binding them to every key from 1 to 8.
No, it was
YOU, who did that, not the game, but
YOU, not just you with normal letters but bold, underlined and in caps, because this cannot be stressed enough. No one else but you (excuse me,
YOU) did that to your own character if you did it at all.
I again link people to these two threads.
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1303444-excusion-of-spell-making-a-bad-developing-decision-and-why/
and
http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1302338-a-small-observation-on-the-amount-of-spells-in-the-game/
because there are many TES players who really feel the spells section of Skyrim is really lacking and would like to see improvements on them. This is the worst spells have ever been in an Elderscrolls game yet and it needs to be fixed either by modders or by Bethesda, preferably by the latter.