From what I remember, Bethesda nerfed the iron dagger exploit.
I just did the math and you'll need to forge approximately 2,385 iron daggers to grind it out to 100 Smithing skill.
If your Speech skill is 100 without perks then you'll need about 17,000 gold assuming that you are selling your daggers along the way. If your Speech skill is relatively low then you'll need up to about another 8,500 in gold.
Magey McFireball, if you play through this time I think you'll find that the changes to the way Smithing skill levels addresses at least one of your concerns. The thing about regarding the old mechanics to be game breaking is that it's is merely subjective opinion. I didn't like the old mechanics either but other players clearly did as evidenced by the numerous complaints about the change when it was implemented.
I agree that the potential for what the game could have been for veteran hardcore PC gamers has been diluted to broaden it's appeal but at the end of the day Bethesda is a for-profit venture and the market for a customer base like that is very finite. If they want the business to grow they have to make it appeal to a broader consumer base and that's going to bring the old adage about pleasing all of the people all of the time into play. It's a boon that they allow and encourage modding to address the needs of the original customer base.
The other thing you might want to note is that if you had kept leveling you would have found that the combat evens out considerably. You were basically wearing armor that ideally wouldn't have been used until around character level 48 (when it starts appearing in merchant and mob loot tables). If you only relied on your Smithing skill, leveling your combat skills and taking combat related perks to scale your damage higher then the enemies would have eventually scaled up to make combat more challenging, especially on Master difficulty level setting. It actually wouldn't have taken you that long.
24 is a bad level to make assessments about the overall difficulty of combat because you're actually going to be above the level of a lot of the enemies you encounter. I wouldn't be surprised if most your dragon encounters were with Dragons and Blood Dragons which are much easier to handle then Elder and Ancient Dragons. They start scaling upwards significantly after Frost Dragons. While the chances of having such an encounter are rare I was unfortunate enough to encounter an Ancient Dragon while I was only level 35ish or so, and it was a futile exercise to try and fight a Dragon that effectively did 600 melee damage per bite, 200 firebreath damage per second and had over 3,000 Health with 50% damage resistance on Maxiumum difficulty settings. Even running for my life took a significant effort. I had to dive into a lake and swim underwater to the East Empire Warehouse docks and hide in a stall until the Dragon lost interest and flew away.
In addition to tougher Dragons you would have been dealing with more powerful spell casters for which your armor would have afforded zero protection unless it had appropriate enchantments, Draugr Deathlords with shouts that could slam you against walls and disarm you and harder hitting Ebony weapons, packs of Falmer using poisoned weapons that would bypass your armor while hitting you with spells, and packs of Forsworn hitting you from multiple directions with melee damage, archery and magic.
That wont address your other concerns but I'm just putting it out there so you know of at least one aspect of the game that gets better as you level.
Out of curiosity how far along did you get in any of the quest lines?