I should start by saying that this website is a great addition to the game. Great builds, well-mannered members ;)
I would like to know on what difficultly most players play. I usually play on Master. Perhaps it could be a future survey. (Perhaps it has already been a survey, if so apologies.)
It's okay. I've got games I've owned for years, games I consider myself fairly skilled at... and I still can't play above the second difficulty.
For Skyrim, I have so many ridiculous AI and difficulty mods that anything more than Adept (a level playing field) is way too brutal.
It varies depending on my character. If I'm RPing a character and want it to feel like he's really struggling, I'll bump it up to around Master, so I have to really be on my guard. If I'm playing some all-powerful character like my coming-soon RP profile character, I'll drop it down a lot lower because it only makes sense for him to cut through the baddies (or in his case, the good guys lol)
I think that Expert (1.5x difficulty) should theoretically give a very good balance, but I find that is not the case. Anything below Master is incredibly easy once you are used to the increased difficulty, with Legendary being a slog of blow-trading (similar to Oblivion's higher difficulty settings). This is not fun. In vanilla Skyrim, Master is the best by far. However, I believe that a combination of mods will get you a better balance (for difficulty, I personally use Requiem, Frostfall, CoT (pitch-black dungeons), Winter Overhaul [only a difficulty mod when combined with Frostfall], Deadly Combat/Dragons, hitstop/recoil, Dragon Combat Overhaul, Sands of Time, and more). If Requiem didn't negate difficulty changes, I would likely drop down to Adept (combat difficulty simply isn't as artificial with the load order I use, and there is no reason to make it so).
I've never messed with the difficulty slider... ever. I loaded the game, saw to it that it was set for Adept and never gave it a second thought xD
Seeing as I get very little time to play, rolling Adept allows me to move through the game a little more quickly and enjoy more of it for the quick snatches I can find ;D
I beat the game on expert difficulty I think, however the whole time I thought I was playing on adept
Most of the time now I play on expert and switch it up to master when I get to higher levels, though. Don't think I've played on adept since character no.3 (out of about 10)
The problem with the difficulty slider is that it doesn't make it more difficult. Most of the battles are just as hard given a basic level of dexterity on the part of the player. The slider just makes the game more time consuming, which only adds to the "difficulty" by virtue of a lack of player endurance. This is stupid.
I'm pretty sure we all can agree with you. Skyrim would be truly harder if the AI were smarter, and more reactive.
Though, I have had an amazing moment that basically accomplished all these traits, so I'm pretty sure that Skyrim can easily be what we want without mods, I'm just not sure how.