I find I might be in a similar boat. I have purchased the following games through recommendations-

"Arx Fatalis, Fallout 1, Vampire the Masquerade, Divine Divinity and Warlords Battlecry"

I find that Arx Fatalis has bugs and crashes on me, Fallout 1 has guns extremely overpowered and melee is useless (to top it off, there's a timer which is lame), Divine Divinity has EXTREMELY slow running speed, and Warlords Battlecry is just terrible.

I really wouldn't recommend any of these games to anyone to save the frustration.

WELL THAT'S JUST LIKE, YOUR OPINION MAAAN.

It seems your only gripe with RPGs is the illusion of free choice they give (not sure if this is true in every case), in contrast to adventure games where the protagonist's views are usually fixed. Why exactly does this mean they do not support serious stories? It would do so if the free development of the player character was the core point of the whole story, but I do not agree this is always the case (I haven't played PS:T yet, so I can't comment on that particular example). I can easily accept some things about the protagonist without every detail being spelled out beforehand.

90% of everything sucks.

They are good at "hero simulation" - essentially, wish-fulfillment. There's nothing wrong with wish-fulfillment.

Counterexample: Spider and Web.

That's not an example of specifically an RPG or for that matter an adventure. It is an intentionally Godwin-like example of a stupid plot contrivance which can be encountered in any genre. In a create-your-own-character RPG, every action that you are forced to take because whatever it is that you want to do is not supported is character-breaking, even those that other players, or you playing another character, would gladly take. In an adventure game (or in an RPG with a defined protagonist), it takes dev stupidity of this caliber to break character. Every action Geralt would not do is Geralt being his principled and/or unimaginative self. No action TNO would not do can be explained from an in-game perspective. The Witcher games have enough flaws, but they do not have this particular flaw of PS:T.

... which is partly a technical limitation and partly outdated RPG design. The genre is young and already doing quite well for it's age, you have yourself given examples of the Witcher games, but there is more. Then there's TES games, which you just can't blame for breaking a character since you only do what you want to (and they DO have a good story, it's just put so it doesn't break any character. Quite an achievement.) But I digress, that's an topic for itself. My point is: When kinetoscope showed sneeze to people for the first time, I'm quite sure they weren't exactly conviced of films being capable of serious storytelling either :-P

snip

Isn't there a way to change that? Do not have a PC copy to try to back up my claim here...

There is.. But its a tedious thing to do.. requires mods and the such.. Once I got the view distance up and then needed to get the render distance to be increased.. Then i needed distant LOD and the list goes on.. I really did like some off Morrowinds features.. like Deadric being very very very very rare and the Unique weapons were cool too.

The world was pretty cool too, probably my favorite Elder Scrolls game to explore. Either way I think it is a good game but I disagree with it being as good as Fallout 2 like the Morrowind fans you mentioned said. Morrowind has a fair share of problems and the combat system is definitely one of them.

not reading all 6 pages on this .... has anyone mentioned Divine Divinity?

It's probably the most unique (in context to GOGs RPG stable) RPG I have seen here; it's like an Ultima Game built out of Diablo 2's engine.

either that or Lands of Lore 2; the rest are OK, but #2 is comparable to Morrowind in my book (just keep in mind that it per-dated morrowind by nearly 6 years, so visually it is closer to a high quality Daggerfall and while it is rather free roaming it is not open world.)

Darklands, Realms of Arkania 2 and Wizardry 7 are my favorite "older RPG's".

I'd say my favorite "newer RPG's" are Fallout, Planescape and Arcanum.

I think they are all absolutely brilliant, but for the "older" one's you will definetely need a pdf of the manual to play them correctly. Newer one's don't need you to read the manual, all information is essentially in the game.

It requires one mod. And it's newest version's got a wizard that takes you step by step trough the process. Or you can just use this, it's fully automated and updates the graphics completely.

Guess what? Your spoiler makes Oblivion even worse. Hmm.. >.>
I think I'mma start a new thread..

You're complaining that Oblivion makes you an undeniable hero and when I say that it actually doesn't, it's even worse. Well that was an unexpected turn of events!

Actually no, I was complaining that Oblivion expects you to randomly become a hero even though you're a nobody ex-con who just happened to be put in the wrong cell.

It becomes worse because, if you so choose to follow that path and become the Big Damn Hero, you're .. not.