I bought Skyrim for basically the same reasons you did with the exception of Morrowind. Never played Morrowind and I don't really intend to.

I enjoyed my time in Oblivion and had few gripes. But everything it did wrong was more or less fixed in Skyrim. Dragons are quite intuitive.

As some mentioned, the questline writing could use some work.
I just don't expect any Dark Brotherhood characters to live for very long in future installments. Seriously, they're getting Joss Whedon-predictable on us. (Those who know his works will know the reference I am making)

I don't even bother with Winterhold unless I really want to make the push for the staff or mask. I just join so I can train and get spells. Beyond that, magic-using enemies are a bunch of asskickers that can tear my caster to pieces.
And who's brilliant idea was it to make the last dungeon constantly drain my mana, effectively shutting the character down who may have already used up their potions from previous random draining? Seriously, fuck that guy.

Fijiman:
I bought Skyrim for basically the same reasons you did with the exception of Morrowind. Never played Morrowind and I don't really intend to.

You're missing out. What is lacks in graphics (these days) it makes up for in sheer size. As a note, it's bigger than Skyrim.

madwarper:
Didn't.

Bethesda has made good games, but I've seen the business model and am learning from the past.

From day 1; ~$60 game 3x ~$10-15 DLC, other miscellaneous DLC = ~$100.
Wait a year; Game + DLC = ~$40.

This, plus I didn't really like Oblivion, so I'll probably wait two or more years for the GotY edition with all the DLC to drop down to 20$ or less...It'll happen eventually, and in the mean time, I'll be working on mods, and playing Mass Effect.

dragons and it looked and sounded awesome

I was feeling angry and depressed for unrelated reasons.

I'd seen a friend playing it, thought it looked good, and as a statement only to myself, made it an impulse buy.

I eventually stopped being depressed, and fortunately, the game held up marvelously.

I thought it was gonna be better than Oblivion.

I think it is, but not as much as I had hoped. And though a decent amount "Bethesda trademarks" that irk me are either tweaked or gone, there are still a lot left.

Long story short, Skyrim is pretty good, I bought it because I thought it was gonna be better.

I got it because I played some of it on my brother's PC and liked it. I liked it for just over 100 hours. Now It's really "meh" to me.

The reason? There's no ending. Sure you kill aduin, but almost immediately afterwords, you get told "This is not the last you will write upon this world," so, it never ended and I keep looking for shit to do. I keep finding fuck all and it pisses me off. I also find that the one thing I keep claiming about massive RPGs like this is true as well, all the different ways to do things are all equally mediocre. Stealth is just freaking stupid. (*Gets arrow in the eye* "Who's there?" *five seconds later* "It must have been my imagination.") Combat is just kinda... boring. Mash M1, occasionally heal self. Step back to dodge, step forward to attack, etc, etc. Everything is just really simple and unrefined.

My mind gets linked to Red Dead Redemption. It's the same kind of open world game in a lot of ways, but RDR had an ending. Not just an ending, but a really good and satisfying one too. I responded to a guy complaining for the same sort of reason a while back. Basically the argument was that there was a limit to the content, the same thing that I'm saying Skyrim sucks and my response was "when you get more that 200 hours of enjoyable content out of a game, you do not have the right to complain that there's nothing more to do." I obviously have to amend this statement. When you get 100 hours out of a game, there has to be an ending to tie it all off and leave the player satisfied that they've done what they need too and can just leave the game if they want, not like in Skyrim where you feel like there's always more to be done, when there's not. Just an actual ending is all I ask. One with credits and... Wait a fuck nugget... SKYRIM DOESN'T HAVE ENDING CREDITS! HAHA I FOUND SOMETHING TO DO IN SKYRIM! WATCH THE CREDITS FROM THE MAIN MENU!

Well why does anyone buy an Elder Scrolls game? To live in and/or dominate the world.

Well, I loved spending hundreds of hours in Oblivion, and since Skyrim looked like an improved version of it with dragons to boot, it was a day 1 purchase.

Now I just need to find the time to actually play the damn thing.

ImProvGamr:
Dragons, magic, questing, and cat-people: so much in one package.

On that note, while gameplay and exploring was up to par, I found most of the quests to be lackluster (college of winterhold... Blegh).

pretty much this. I wish I was more into exploring though. Another reason was how epic Oblivion was, especially when I modded it.
of topic: are captchas annoying or what?

Hate Morrowind, hate Oblivion. Love Fallout 3. Love vikings and Norse stuff and dragons.

Figured it would probably fall on the Fallout 3 side of things and be awesome. It was.

Having been enormously underwhelmed by Oblivion, I was not planning on getting it.

What changed my mind?

1) My friends. For the most part we share tastes and, like me, they did not like Oblivion. So when they said Skyrim was awesome, I listened.
2) I love Vikings and snow and mountains and dragons. Skyrim is MUCH more fun to explore than Cyrodiil.
3) I heard an excerpt of the soundtrack.
4) FUS RO DAH! youtube videos. Yes, I am ashamed to say they were what triggered me to spend my cash on it instead of buying food for a few weeks. No regrets.

I am giving it a few months so I can forget some of the immediate memories before going back to it (I can play ME2 in my head, all dialogue included, which has kind of spoiled the actual game a bit...), but am very much looking forward to Skyrim round 2. Not a perfect game, but sheer 'epicness' makes up for it.

I didn't buy Skyrim because Fallout 3 & New Vegas (which Bethesda did do the patching for as well as the dlc) still freeze up my ps3 constantly and I hear that Skyrim has the same problem.

I love their creative work, they just seem technically incompetent.
I'll probably get goty for the pc, by that time I'm confident the modders will at least have fixed it up.

Tayh:
I didn't.
Partly because of I haven't forgiven Bethesda for what they did to Fallout, partly because it's a steam exclusive.

By 'did to Fallout' I assume you mean either the decimation of Fallout in the form of New Vegas or the conversion to fps..

I bought it under the assumption that it was like Oblivion, but bigger and with the combat system vastly improved. It was, and I'm quite happy with it.

seagoon:
By 'did to Fallout' I assume you mean either the decimation of Fallout in the form of New Vegas or the conversion to fps..

It's the FPS thing.
Fallout was supposed to be a squadbased, turnbased, tactical, isometric survival RPG set in a post-apocalypse setting, not a mediocre FPS shooter with a tacky VATS feature.

Because Bethesda is my favorite developer and Oblivion and Fallout 3 rank among my top 5 games.

I got it for Christmas, I would've waited until the GOTY edition came out but I'm happy I got it, it gave me a newfound love for TES series (short time with oblivion, got bored fast)