Do you think The Witcher 3 (a game which I think is better than Skyrim in nearly every respect) would have been as popular as it is without Skyrim paving the way? I don't. It took complicated RPG's and made them accessible - and despite the bitching of the few, it did it mostly without removing actual complexity

Sorry, tl;dr coming up. I'm sure you knew someone might take a stab at this and I don't blame you if you don't feel like responding, this is mostly me taking a chance to address something I feel pretty strongly about but also is quite relevant to a comparison between these three games in particular.

You're not entirely wrong, but two points:

• Oblivion and Fallout 3 majorly helped pave the way for Skyrim's success, too. They were big hits despite not simplifying things as much as Skyrim did. Even Morrowind had impressive sales even though it was way less accessible.

• As for not removing actual complexity... mmm, I hate to be one of the, as you call them, "bitching few" but I'm not sure how much I can agree with that statement. One very important change took place from Fallout 3 to Skyrim and that's quest design. Skyrim had way more kill this, fetch that type quests, something Bethesda went on to latch on to even more with Fallout 4. There's also the fact that they basically killed character creation - made it work more like a standard skill tree/ability system that you grow into and pick level-by-level rather than, you know, an actual RPG's character creation, where you can customize skills/abilities/class based on the backstory and traits you envision for your character. That became impossible in Skyrim because every starting character was the same blank slate, an enormous difference from Oblivion and Morrowind. This isn't a trivial difference by any means either, especially since it largely carried over into Fallout 4 where it became a lot more controversial, probably due to the different franchise.

I'd argue Skyrim didn't need to make these changes to be a huge success. People would've loved it regardless, it would've become a huge hit regardless, because Bethesda was on a roll and the feature that people truly fell in love with, the open world and player freedom to move around it, would've still been there. But it did make them, was worse off as a result and, perhaps worse still, may have influenced others to move in similar directions. Skyrim's changes in these regards represent a move toward more hand holding and less respect for players' intelligence, with mostly extremely simple, impossible-to-fail quests and character creation that can't be screwed up because there's nothing to even make a real decision on. And perhaps even more egregiously, more "procedural" and generic radiant killfetching content rather than lovingly handcrafted quests and locales. These things actually clash with the ideas of an immersive, believable open world and the sense of discovery and exploration that otherwise drive the game and are done so well. They're attempts to make the game more accessible, that remove complexity and much valuable RPG flavor, that weren't even necessary to begin with and made the game worse.

I want to be clear that I love Skyrim and consider it a better game than both Oblivion and Fallout 3 by a pretty wide margin (not better than Morrowind, though, but that's for somewhat different reasons). But the criticisms thrown at some of the most important changes it made are definitely not without merit and are not empty bitching. Some of the ways in which it removed complexity damaged the game and made it worse. As someone who is a huge fan of Bethesda's games in general, I see some of the trends Skyrim either started or accelerated as very worrying, and I dearly hope that they take inspiration from games like TW3 (for the dedication to making excellent quests, stories and characters even within the context of a massive open world) and BotW (for an open world design that respects its players way more) for TES VI.