I don't believe skyrim or any other elder scrolls game is a game for me.
I can sympathies with you if only because all the things you say are in the similar vein to all my complaints about WoW and loot driven games. I feel nothing from obtaining different coloured loot when it still does the same thing in the end but the name of it has a different colour or it has a different coloured particle effect to it.
It's like, you never see dudes in fantasy fiction like game of thrones or name of the wind or lord of the rings running up to every single dead orc they kill and robbing them of their worldly possessions. Like you don't just have this random minion wandering around with a sword that does +5 ice damage and makes the target bleed for five seconds, when none of the other swords from the same pack of orcs has anything like that.
Like, you still end up getting a sweet sword if you battle through a dungeon and kill the leader or boss or whatever. They'll almost always have a sword or a staff with some magic ability put into it. But it does get rendered useless for anyone who power games it and goes down the blacksmithing tree only to make the best item the game's ever seen within the span of five hours and never need another piece of loot again.
A lot of people get into Skyrim for no other reason than to look at pretty art and have a bit of a power fantasy. It's all story driven and is supposed to hinge on the player himself acting as this catalyst to save the world.
It's a first person shooter with swords. You have a weapon, a hundred bad guys and ten times that many as pallet swapped clones, and you're given an objective marker a metre behind the guy at the back with promise of a cutscene when you get there.
For all the loot amalur throws at me, I never feel like I'm actually getting anything different. I do a bit more damage, but by the time that accumulates I've already moved on to the next area where enemies have that much more health to their name than I have swords on my back.
It's the same thing dressed up different ways as far as I care to notice. It just seems like the games with coloured loot focus more on rubbing out quests to get more coloured loot, and the games with story focus more on trying to shoehorn in gameplay mechanics inbetween verbalised walls of text.
The point is, more games should be STALKER and Far Cry 2.