Given the trajectory of the series (and Bethesda games in general) I have this creeping fear that it's going to be even more watered down than Skyrim is. It seems like with every game Bethesda releases they strip away RPG elements and dialogue and "streamline" everything, effectively making their beloved RPG franchises into action-adventure games like they did with Fallout 4. What are the odds they turn it around and actually make the excellent first person open world RPG the series deserves?
My dream is for TES to get it's own New Vegas, a return-to-form RPG from an outside company that actually knows how to write an interesting video game
No, Bethesda has been lobotomizing their RPGs since Oblivion. Fallout 4 is the absolute maximum amount of streamlining and theme park open world design you can go and still be passable
EDIT: I should add that Bethesda is certainly going to keep doing this, and I expect TES6 and Fallout 5 are going to sink to new lows with how much RP of the RPG they're making stripped out. The only lesson they've seemed to learn was not to do a voiced protagonist again,
Since Daggerfall, frankly. If you read 2002 forum posts about Morrowind the criticisms are all exactly the same as the 2011 criticisms of Skyrim, which were also pretty much exactly the same as the 2006 criticisms of Oblivion. With every release, they 'streamline' out so much of the interesting stuff that tons of fans of the previous entry always hate it.
I liked Oblivion, but that's probably because I only played it literally a year after Morrowind and it seemed like such a humongous leap forward.