No. It's piss-poor design, and your fanboy/fangirl reactions don't change that.

The issue is that most of the would-be neat extras added to the game are worthless because Bethesda half-assed them.

Marriage:

There are two methods of doing this right: The first is to provide a limited selection of available partners but to fully develop each partner's personality and write quests specific to each character. The second is to allow for open selection of any available partner (that could be married without impacting plot) but assign generic quests and dialogue (perhaps tailored to profession or other characteristics, but non-specific nonetheless).

Bethesda chose a half-assed implementation of the first method, lacking the strengths of either system yet having the weaknesses of both.

Simple NPC properties for marital status (0 = character married or not available/interested, 1 = character can be married) and profession (for quest/store/etc assignments) and a few extra lines of dialogue for each voice actor would have rendered scripting for open partner selection an easy task. (If not familiar with TES scripting, just trust me on this; it isn't as complex as it might seem to you, and it wouldn't require a separate script for each character.)

Instead, we have a system of preselected partners that is just as generic as would result from the above but fails to satisfy many players because of its limited range of choices (made worse by the fact that some races and character types are either not represented or underrepresented). Rather than a neat extra, it becomes an irritation that interesting prospective partners cannot be married despite seeming availability.

Companions and Horses:

First and foremost, companions are scaled to player level when first entering the area in which the companion is found and do not increase level with the player. There is NO excuse for this as the mechanics for generic leveling of NPCs exists in the engine and could be applied to companions with minimal effort (a few minutes of scripting).

Second, piss-poor AI results in companions and horses that gleefully charge to their deaths at every available opportunity and pursue enemies halfway across the world map. This could be addressed with a simple control such as a shouted command (or a reaction to the player sheating his or her weapon) to cancel combat or pursuit of a distant enemy and return to the player (ala Resident Evil 5), or the ability to adjust companion tactics to player style (sneak-when-I-sneak & prefer-ranged-attacks for stealth mode, non-combat mode for horses, etc). The lazy but still acceptable alternative would be to mark companions essential (not able to be permanently killed) to negate the irritation of poor AI and lack of tactical controls causing companions to die. Bethesda failed to do either, resulting in companions and horses that are annoying burdens best avoided rather than neat or useful extras.

Seriously: Being given a horse during a certain quest has been more an irritation than a boon. Whenever I fast travel, the horse travels with me. I can no longer use stealth outdoors because the horse charges into combat and alerts all nearby enemies, resulting in a f***ing battle royale that could have been avoided with a few tactical kills using either stealth or terrain. I also tire of chasing and protecting the damn thing when it pursues a retreating or distant enemy and inevitably stumbles onto another pack of enemies. I already killed my Spectral Assassin companion for similar reasons, and now I'm considering killing the horse because it is so irritating, which is just sad.

A quest can involve fetching or killing without being a "fetch/kill quest". A good example from Skyrim itself is the quest involving Saadia (the Redguard server working at The Bannered Mare in Whiterun). Her quest is short but has an interesting story discovered as the quest progresses and having two possible resolutions depending on player inclination (neither of which screws the player). It's a great quest, and if more Skyrim quests were of this sort, I wouldn't be complaining.

Seriously, instead of Dragonborn the player should be called Deliveryborn.

"Deliver this object to that town for me because I'd rather pay 500 gold to you than hire one of those carriages for 50 gold."

Yeah, that's quality writing. (dripping sarcasm)

And don't get me started on the near complete lack of real options during faction quests. For example, the Dark Brotherhood storyline builds an interesting conflict between two views of the nature of the faction and its future but ultimately allows for only a single resolution. Just like Oblivion: One side is "right", and that's the side you play.

No. I criticize other games for some of these same things. Also, there are games that do some of these things better, but I'm not interested in debating game X versus Skyrim.

You are the one giving Skyrim preferential treatment by overlooking its flaws because it can be modded.

Most of what I ask for would have been incredibly simple to implement.

Other things I ask for would have simply required better development priorities or decisions (for example, 100 interesting quests instead of 200 fetch/kill quests).

In addition, BECAUSE IT'S SKYRIM, because it follows hundreds of modders working on two previous TES games, Bethesda should have a distinct advantage of insight about what kinds of changes are desired by players and how such changes affect gameplay when implemented. Yet despite this advantage Bethesda still fails to deliver a polished product.