I would have payed for it if it weren't for Steam. The artwork in the game alone is worth the money, but I hate Steam's practices when it comes to forced automatic updates. They seem to think they can alter content on people's hard drives that does not belong to them (Steam). People who bought the DVD and licenced it through Steam seem to lose ownership of their game files. I disagree with the whole mentality of "automatic updates" because it can and does go wrong.
I want full control of the files on my computer, and I want to be able to read up on an update before I apply it. And it is going to be ME that applies it, not a remote machine.
Now it sounds like there are bugs and problems with the Creation Kit and Steam Workshop (specifically to do with mod intallations and mod loading order, incompatibilities and wrong updates). I am not surprised. People who want to apply mods should be shown how to manually install, and how to set mod loading order themselves instead of dumbly relying on an automatic service that can never work 100%.
BTW, I am thinking of suggesting a tutorial on how to remove Skyrim from Steam on a PC and run it as it should be, a stand-alone program.
I wish there was a way to send the message to Bethesda, that is , many of us will boycott games locked into Steam or any other online DRM.
As regards value for money otherwise, time spent on fixing the game and looking up solutions to bugs on the internet should be deducted from total time spent on the game to arrive at actual time enjoyed playing!
There is no way I would have played this game for more than a few days without internet access. Possibly the most oblique piece of software I have ever used. Bethesda charges money for value added to the game for nothing by the fans, namely modders and people who write the wikis.
I still fondly remember trying to figure out what was going on in Helgen, what i was supposed to do, and why that navigation arrow was leading me to an empty room. All during massive lag and mouse jitter because the PC version is a crappy port from the console and needs extensive tweaking. Not to mention how terrible the graphics looked without mods, especially in dungeons- is that a staircase or a vertical wall?