Did you do all of this via fast travel? Because if you did then that explains a lot. I usually make it a point not to do fast travel, forcing me to group up quests and actually ride from one end of the continent to the other in a string, which is an amazing experience, especially if you don't do the main quest right away. If you do you won't enjoy it as much unless you have shadowmere since horses have a tendency to die frequently due to dragon attacks. I still haven't fully completed even one faction on my character. Although I've done quite a few Daedric Quests and a sizable amount of side-quests and I'm level 52 right now and have just recently activated the random dragon encounters of the main quest by getting the ball rolling. I have all the expansions and I haven't even touched them and I've had this character for about 500hrs+. Hard to say since I'm not near him right now. But yeah, the amount of time also greatly increased due to my implementation of a multitude of role play quirks I gave him, such as a need to sleep and feed(Vampire). It should take me a very long time to get this guy finished and I probably won't even stop playing him after that as he's got the Role Play Longevity of Morrowind and Oblivion under his Belt, as he was my main character in those titles as well.
I consider Skyrim to be his rise in Vampiric Power as he wasn't a very powerful Vampire in the titles before. After all, in morrowind he was a Knight who fell to the Curse of Vampirism, in Oblivion he was a Warrior/Asssassin Combo (Which I started from the very beginning as a vampire) and now he's a full fledged creature of Darkness, shrouded in unholy energies and utilizing magics on a whim while also being a master assassin and warrior. Now nothing is outside of his grasp. However, he has to work his way to getting his ultimate power as I made that the rules for this character. In other words I limited him to being a Vampire, not a Vampire lord, until he is level 81. I also limited him to not completing the portion of the companions quest-line where you're given the transformation to a werewolf, as I aim to glitch him to have the werewolf form as well, until he is also 81, and finally I also have limited his access to smithing and enchanting until he has maxed to 81 and maxed his VL and WW perk trees.
Until then he is grounded to what he finds in the world. I see this story of his taking quite a while to attain perfection which gives him that rising to power feeling. And trust me, it's an amazing feeling when you go out of your way to limit your character and what you can do to such a degree because as you get stronger at everything you do you look back at all the hard times you made for yourself and find a real sense of achievement in them. And the funny thing is I've already made this character before and leveled him near the max. I had to restart him because a friend accidentally saved over his file while I was sleeping and he was around the 800+ mark and it was when Skyrim First Launched. After his, "death," I ended up screwing around with other characters and seeing the entirety of the game and finding all the quirks to augment to my Main Character when I was to remake him. If anything, its always worth starting a new play-through and doing something similar, if not at least limiting or even not fast traveling at all, minus the use of carriages and horses. Then it's also pretty fun to get into the head of the character and interact with the world the way you think the character would. Also, leveling anything up should never be a chore. If it is then you're doing it wrong.
You should try going about things like speech and such in a scenario. For instance, your character has just completed the Civil War Quest line. Perhaps your character has grown disgusted with violence and has pledged to heal the weak and suffering of the world as a Priest of the Divines and now only uses Restoration magics and alchemy to heal his traveling companion as he wanders Skyrim in search of wayward souls in need of help. Or perhaps he became a merchant after adventuring for so long in order to see through the eyes of the common man as he sells off the treasures he's collected from the many dungeons he's traversed in order to fund his smithing business he's trying to pick up off the ground. Either way it alleviates the feeling of leveling up being a chore on you and more of just you getting better at what you're doing because its only natural. So yeah, there's my advice on how to make this game ridiculously long as well as entertaining. Oh, and another thing to make it even more entertaining is to limit the loot you take off of bodies to, for instance, just weapons and never take standing stones that increase your skills faster. That way you really feel like your character is learning how to be the role he is and so money takes forever to accumulate, in essence extending the time it takes to acquire large sums of currency for things like houses and such.
Well, that's my advice, nothing more, nothing less and by no means am I telling you you have to do these things in order to add longevity to your play experience. After all, you could always do something as simple as turning your skyrim experience on that character into a giant hunting sim. Its pretty crazy the things you can do in this game. I hope my advice helps and good luck with your character.
