You DO have to "pick" some skills/stats to focus on for each level, and to spend some effort avoiding certain skills, but only when they are at such low levels that "incidental" use could raise them five or ten points. Once any skill reachs 25 or so, incidental use would only burn a couple of points, and you can always afford to do that! It's not that tedious. You dump all your loot outside the shops in a pile in town and wait for a level where you want to raise Personality before selling it off. You save some of the "get people to like you" quests for the levels when you are selling stuff. You save the arena combats for levels when you want to raise Heavy Armor (or Light Armor). You save money by delaying House purchases (except for the Waterfront) to spend on Training sessions, and you train what would be the most tedious skills to raise manually, like Armorer, Athletics, Mercantile, maybe Block or a weapon skill.
What you say sounds appealing until you get into the details, as you say here. For me, with the utility I wrote, what you specify here is not 'that' far away from what I ended up doing. I am enough of a perfectionist that if I can work just a bit harder to be just a bit better, I do it.
I never finished all the content when I played. My character was 32 or so, had 100 in every stat, 100 in just about every skill, and was incredibly powerful. I was past all the tedium of leveling, and planning to explore all the content but I got bored. Part of that was that I discovered that the spell creation is not balanced, particularly because of the spell stacking.
My character on his own is pretty powerful, but when you add a few custom spells, he became near godly. I might have to launch the game to remember all the details but I remember it vaguely. One spell I made was a combo regen/fatigue regen spell which I found to be incredibly powerful. I think it was something like 1 or 2 health regen and 5 or 10 fatigue regen, with the max duration you can make a spell, 2 min? I made 2 min versions of the various vision/light combinations for various situations. A 2 min invis. A 2 min speed spell. A 2 min max feather spell. (Although this is one case where the store bought spells are better).
That was where things started to get silly. I discovered that 2 spells with the same effect, but different names, stack effects. So you can make a Feather 100 One, Feather 100 Two, Feather 100 Three, Feather 100 Four, Feather 100 Five, etc spells. Stack a few and you can carry anything. (This was a carry over from stacking different feather potions, which also works, and is easier to do, and more effective if you dont mind using potions, because feather potions go up to 300 or 400 or so).
And then I found something really silly. You can make a +100 Speed spell which will make you run fast. You can make about 8 of these, and if you cast them all at once, you will be the flash, running much faster than someone on a horse does. Make the first one also give water walking and you can run on water.
How do you cast all these spells? When a 2 min duration +100 Speed spell is like 300 mana or something?
Make a +100 mana spell (or was it +INT, I forgot), make a bunch of them. You can easily get your mana pool well over 1000 by casting a few, the more you cast, the more effective casting more of them is, because mana regen is based on your total mana pool. Get your mana pool up over 1000 and your regen rate will be so high that you will never be able to run out (until the spells wear off), you will only have to wait a second or so to gain back the 300 mana cost of those huge spells.
Which lets you make some super kill spells that cost 700-1000 mana. I made one spell that did 200 of each type of damage, it was pretty silly.
You may call all that cheating, it certainly is at least a minor exploit, but it was fun to do for a brief time. After that, I stuck with the regular custom spells for health/fatigue, vision/light, (and some flash running to get around I must admit) etc, but even using those, which were not exploits, I just played less and less until now, when I have not played for months.
Don't get me wrong, I think it is a great game. I loved playing it for about 2 months. But I think it would have been even better with some changes to the leveling system. Just decoupling attribute gain from leveling would be a huge win. Or even just include a 'rollover', so unused bonuses will continue into the next level. If you have to reduce the max to +4 or even +3 per level, that would be fine by me, it would be even less I would have to worry about.
On the subject of endurance, I would change it so that endurance gains retroactively effect your hit points, so again, you do not lose out irrovocably if you do not start with the highest endurance possible, and increase endurance by 5 every level thereafter. (In my character, I think I hit max endurance in my teens, because I was so worried about this).
I like that what actions you do determines what skills you level. What I do not like is the
permanent negative consequences to making a particular choice. I would prefer a system that would let you make it up later.
