I think we made some progress in my point, so I just want to try to drive it home. The original argument was “Skyrim was a blight on the games industry.”
The reason I am trying to say that “Skyrim is influential on modern RPGs” is to disagree with the blight comment. I believe there are many ways that modern RPGs benefit from Skyrim’s contribution to the genre.
If Skyrim were truly a blight, we’d have more like the new Assassins Creed where it’s a massive world with little content to discover. To me, the problem with that argument though is that Skyrim and Assassin’s Creed are still pretty fun without the narrative content.