I'm giving Oblivion another chance.
I got seriously bored with it when it first came out; the game balance/challenge issues were so severe that it got old fast. Well, pretty fast -- I did put tens of hours into it, which is more than most games take to finish. There was just no sense of progression or consequence in it, so I gave up. Also it gave what I thought was my pretty good video card the heebie-jeebies.
I've since upgraded my video card to something even nastier (GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, if somebody cares), and Oscuro has been hard at work... so I re-installed it, dropped in OOO, and got going.
I'm just out the gate and I like it a lot more already. I'm getting my ass handed to me by bandits, since click-spamming with the short sword no longer works, which is as it should be, and I almost got et by a swordfish on my first swim. We'll see how it pans out later, but it does look like Oscuro may have turned it into something that's actually challenging and rewarding in the meantime.
Oh, and that mean new card of mine runs it smooth as butter at 1920 x 1200 even outdoors. Nyah nyah. It's also quieter with the stock cooler than my old one was with the Zalman VF700Cu cooler on it. I know 3 C's isn't chickenfeed, but it's one fine card for the price.
(I also made a conscious decision not to min-max or exploit: I picked a stock class matching the way I want to play, and intend to stick to it. If it turns out to be fun, great, if not, it's back to the ol' bookshelf with it.)