I found Skyrim's leveling quite unforgiving also, except that it's worse, because it's a treadmill in Skyrim. To me, it makes sense that there would be dungeons you can't handle until you level up. Also, that way you have to level up before you become gain leadership roles, etc.

I really hate how they dumbed down the enchanting system and killed the spellcrafting system. To be sure, they should have allowed you to create low magnitude constant effect enchantments from Morrowind, but I miss creative enchantments and spells. I want to make my AOE fire+weakness to fire+paralysis spell