Most people are bitching that it was designed with console limitations in mind which made the game worse. Frankly I think thats bullshit, there's not much a standard game capable PC can do that a 360 or PS3 can't

An admirably moderate and liberal perspective...too bad that the practical consequences of such a view is that the people out there who genuinely believe, say, "Postal" or "Leisure Suit Larry Box Office Bust" to be good games are also right to hold such opinions. I'm willing to bet that those of us who still haven't forgotten the meaning of "bad taste" would beg to differ, though....

it's a fact that not everyone hates a certain game. So you will always have fans vs haters. That's why i absolutely ignore top 10 lists.
If i don't like a game i won't start liking it because it is on the nr 1 place in another 14 in a dozen list. i respect people's opinions.
i totally agree with syme. why the hell did they invent that you are not sure to hit an nmy if the crosshair is between the eyes. if i am a gun at the target in real life i know i will hit that spot.
In games its a matter of a diceroll :s

Well VTM Bloodlines was the same, a cone of probability decreasing in radius as your skill improved and I don't remember anyone complaining too badly about that (it was more about the first person perspective than the control/skill interface).
Ironically it meant the more skill your character had, the more skill the player had to have since it made it more and more like a precision FPS

Exactly right. I think that people who consider abominations like, say Britney Speirs, as musicians are insulting real musicians, like my wife who is educated violin player and sacrificed her whole youth to master the art of music. So I don't give a shit what people think. They're wrong.

Except a proper, mouse-driven GUI. Incidentally, the GUI is probably the biggest gripe many people have with the game.

Well in THEORY both are more than capable of it (and I understand that the PS3 can but there's no point since noone writes for it), the people in charge simply haven't provided the tools
So how was the interface in the PC version of oblivion then?

Big, bloated and inefficient... because it was essentially the same as on Xbox 360. However, there are some mods that make it better.

Non-tiny resolutions?
Patches?
Mods?
Expansions and updates(Especially versus the PS3)?
Mouse/Keyboard control?
No framerate limits?
The console limitations thing is primarily the lack of keyboard utilization, and Bethesda/Bioware's refusal to update game interfaces for higher resolutions, Oblivion and Fallout 3 especially suffered from this, I can't play them without a UI mod, as well as the general feeling that mini-games and interactions were designed for those with no mouse and a limited number of buttons (Persuasion anyone?).

Taste being subjective, my point stands. You can talk about bad taste all you want, but it boils down to opinion only. Just because the majority may agree with you doesn't make it any less opinion.
I hate (to address a point Summit made) Britney Spears as much as the next person with 'taste', but it doesn't make my opinion any more valid than someone who loves Spears. With apologies to your wife, Summit, her taste isn't any more valid than anyone else's, no matter how much of her life she's spent studying music.

Perhaps then, the problem lies not in having different opinions/tastes, persay, but in having an "unconsidered" opinion. If you (to take your Spears example) can *explain to me* why you like her music, then that's fine. If on the other hand you couldn't tell me why, I might take it with a grain or two of salt.
This thread's a good example, people here on both sides of the Oblivion issue, and both having long, detailed arguments for their opinions. That's good, that way everybody gets my respect, even if I don't agree with them.
Maybe a Socrates paraphrase will work:
"The unexamined (game/music/book/movie/opinion) is not worth (playing/listening/reading/watching/advocating)"
Okay that's a bit clunky, and all this may be obvious to everyone but me already, but that's my $0.02.

Agreed, phanboy4. That's once again what I'm trying to point out in my rather roundabout way: opinions are fine and perfectly valid. But they have much less weight if they're not informed or well-argued opinions. In the end though... still just opinions. But what we often get when people are discussing games (or other forms of entertainment) are black and white pronouncements that the game sucks with no regard to (going back to Gagt's point) the actual quality of the game itself. Too many times opinion is held to indicate quality, when it usually does no such thing.

It doesn't make your opinion anymore valid, true, but it doesn't make Speirs a musician either. She's just a cheap product. If people like her that's their choice. But I won't stand calling her a musician just as won't stand calling games like Oblivion RPG's. It absolutely fails at role-playing aspect and that's the point. It isn't the matter of taste. I actually enjoyed Oblivion for a while and praised it for beautiful graphics and great music. None of that things make it a good RPG. The thing I'm trying to say is that Oblivion shouldn't even be on that list in the first place. It has nothin to do with taste.
Oh and no apologies needed :)

These discussions are inevitably expressions of opinions because the standards used are almost never expressed, let alone agreed upon. When reading people's opinions, one can often detect the underlying principles that the person uses to say a game is good or bad.
To decide standards, the purpose of games would need to be agreed: either one purpose for all games or (more likely) several purposes, each with its own standards of evaluation.
This all a lot of bother, which is why we settle for talking past one another.

Yet no one has the right to hold an opinion until one can defend it properly.