Quote Originally Posted by veti View Post
Yeah well, all the vanilla factions are pants. The only one that comes close to a satisfying storyline is the Dawnguard, and that took an entire paid DLC to add it in. And even that is only middling.

Compare any of the big three - fighters, mages, thieves - with their counterparts in Oblivion or Morrowind, and you can't help but see how rushed the Skyrim versions are.

I suspect the civil war was supposed to pick up some of that slack, but that proved to be a horrible mistake.
If I had to guess, the dev team worked too long on the Civil war, and because it never worked the way they wanted, they lost a ton of time that they couldn't afterwards put into the other factions.