Bethesda already slowly change their direction toward to action game with RPG elements to ever since Oblivion, traditional kind of RPG is just not the kind of game Bethesda(or what's left of it after Morrowind) want to make anymore.
And to be fair, Skyrim is a pretty good for time waster game, it's also the most polished(compare to their other releases) game they ever made, it's not the best game ever, but at least it's fun enough for most people.
And about interesting characters and story, we all know Emil "Keep it simple and stupid" Pagliarulo is not going to provide such thing to players, so until the day he quit or fired, there won't be any quality writing in any Bethesda game in the future.
And about Fallout 3 fans, most of them are fine as long they don't keep using their own headcanon as counter argument, or keep using strawman tactics like saying people just nostalgic or calling them haters.