i do believe there is a cancel button in dialogue on skyrim, for 360 its B, however it might be esc or something on pc.

Defaults to "O" on the PS3, and you're right, that will get you out of most quest acceptance dialogue chains.

What happens is it's making mess in your journal along with million other boring fed-ex quests you never would have bothered to accept in the first place.
It's just the matter of opinion. You may like the game i got bored with it's shallowness after some time. And it's a shame because it's really beautiful and well designed world and it would have been great if it wasn't written by monkeys with keyboards. God, i wish Obsidian did the writing and quest design and Bethesda everyting else.

Actually, your real life comparison works rather good here. You read about a special item / event from the past by reading a book, learn about places while talking with others or hearing of interesting / dangerous / whatever places from other NPCs. Don't see these as quests (which you wouldn't in RL), instead as a mental note which you can but don't have to follow.
For me this really added to the questdesign / immersive world. I also can't think of any other games where this has been done so well / believable.

While I do agree, that there should be a way to drop a quest from your menu or plain say no to it, it probably interferes with the current capability of the questsystem (like the gameengine interferes / shows it's limits with the whole civil war questline). The following consequences needed and to knock off any possible interferences with other quests, seems rather daunting big to me.

Let's take the start of the Dark Brotherhood as example: you enter the house and talk with the kid:
- accept it (vanilla version)
- killing the kid (turning in to the guards won't work, they stated in random chatter to know about him / won't interfere), consequences?
- say no with adding the consequence of the DB being after you relentlessly for the rest of the game, as you're actively destroying their reputation
assuming you accepted / done the job, next stop would be the meeting with Astrid
- doing what's been asked (vanilla)
- refusing / attacking Astrid (vanilla)
again, let's head the most likely way and we're now up to meet the DB at their base. From now on, you simply can't quit or deny anymore without the consequence of them all turning against you (not acceptable to let a traitor with internal knowledge / base location live).

Sounds fairly doable, doesn't it? Well, let's take a quick look for the Thieves guild.....

I'd like the option of going with Mjoll against the thieves guild for example. Let's think it would be possible and what's needed to do so:
- find evidence of activities / who's involved in the TG (everything else comes out as a mindless murderer on a rampage)
- once you have that, go for them, bringing them to justice / killing / whatever (several options)
- insert counteractions from the guilds supporter, including Maven and her influence on the court / Jarl (lots of options / possibilities)
- getting more evidence to go for Maven and what to do once you have them (several options)
- possible split in the questline, concerning the Jarl's involvement - is she and her court: just incompetent and clueless / somewhat or parts of the court involved but wanting to get out (or not) / deeply involved and out to get you? (near endless options)
- Now add a possible switch of the Jarl's (at any time between this questline possible) during the civil war questline on to that....

This is just a rather quick and dirty choices / consequences questline and as you can see, far from being finished - there's a lot more options / possibilities coming afterwards or that I haven't thought of inbetween.
Now add roleplaying onto it. How much do you need, to get everything your way, considering all options / roles / outcomes / consequences?

Well, I'm glad that didn't happen. Considering F:NV you started buried six feet under, taken out by a robot controlled by a mysterious stranger who seems to know all and couldn't find a better suited guy to do his jobs then a dead one, your brain pieced back together in a wooden cottage by a (seemingly) medical genius. Depending which road you took, you may go through a village with almost all inhabitants murdered and the ones who done so freely telling you, so you can spread it (which happens exactly once with no consequences following). Next stop is sending some ghouls with a rocket to outer space....

Don't get me wrong, I liked F:NV. And while I see how others might dislike F3 for it's "in your face good / evil decisions / storyline" (which Bethesda clearly avoided on several occasions in Skyrim), the whole story came a lot more believable over, where F:NV took the wacky road.

I just don't understand this "It's in my quest log so I must do it!" mentality.

I get completion-ism but that's not the games issue. The game is doing nothing wrong by offering you a lot of quest options. Unless you're doing a quest line, the game never holds a gun to your head forcing you to do anything.

It's a dangerous thing to be a completist in Skyrim, anyway. Those little cluttersome quests you collect are randomly generated and supposedly infinite, so it could take some time to finish them all!

I'm like you, though - I tend to pursue what I'm most interested in and leave the rest for diversions when I get bored pursuing a real questline. Or when I'm broke and need money for potions :P

That's a good point. You can't complete Skyrim.The game randomly spawns quests.

Not terribly GOOD ones, but I like them simply because they solve the "I need money/equipment/potions/soulgems/scrolls/food but can't decide where to go hunt" problem that Oblivion suffered from. Y'know, where you knew you wanted to hunt bandits, and spent five minutes fumbling with the world map trying to remember which of the little tent icons had a respawning chest.

It's a pretty lucrative system. Get enchanting up, then go hunt bandits, Loot them, enchant their stuff, and then sell it.

I finally stopped doing that when I got Enchanting high enough and realized I had nothing to spend 20,000 on.

Well, I can see the point of being able to dismiss / abandon or drop a quest entirely.

For example, the guy standing in Markarth in front of the abandoned house (Molag Bal quest) kept bugging me about it and I really just took on it, to get rid of him once and for all, since Markarth has my favourite home.

I also won't do the Namira questline ever again, as the consequences and random encounter in the gameworld are just... well, not working for me, on no roles I could possibly pick (even though i really liked Eola as a follower).
Right now, the only option I have here is to ignore it completely and not going there / not speaking to certain NPCs, so it never appears on my log.

However, as I stated above with the Thieves guild example, this could be quite a challenge to pull off and I doubt that the questsystem could handle it.

.... ... need .... youtube.... video.... naow!

I haven't played Skyrim but i do like this

Yeah. Music from a video game shouldn't be able to bring a tear to my eye, that's reserved for manipulative movies from the '50s designed particularly to do so.

The song is great, absolutely, but Judith's voice is what did it for me to be honest.

That's what I meant! The song's mediocre. I have never heard a more beautiful voice.