Morrowind is the best TES game.

Morrowind was tough, clunky, gritty and demanding, alongside outright fantastical (setting-wise). So, for anyone who experienced Morrowind during its time and place in gaming, most would say it's a better game than Oblivion.

For someone like yourself? You would find Oblivion more amenable and enjoyable, given its shared features and format to Skyrim, and probably would find it a better game.

Depends on what you're looking for, and how much jank you're willing to tolerate. Morrowind in general has a lot more freedom than both Oblivion and Skyrim, namely in that you can kill any NPC you want. No one is rendered invulnerable like they are in present day Bethesda games, including characters that are part of quests. There are no quest markers either; you have to find everything yourself, oftentimes relying on directions to navigate your way around. Your stats also mattered; various factions like the Fighters, Mages, and Thieves Guilds wanted people with sufficient skills related to their eponymous specialties. If you weren't up to par, they wouldn't accept you into their ranks, and they expected you to level up the right skills to qualify for promotion. So some big dumb, axe-wielding brute who never cast a spell in his life couldn't ever get into the Mage's Guild in Morrowind like he could in Oblivion and Skyrim.

You could also get booted out of a faction permanently or barred from ever being able to enter it in the first place depending on what things you did, which cut you out of whole questlines. Even the main quest could be rendered impossible to complete if you did the wrong thing or killed the wrong person. And there were ways to screw yourself further that made total sense in the world. Getting a bounty of more than 5000 septims would permanently mark you as kill on sight by all guards on the island. Being caught turning into a werewolf would make EVERYONE hostile to you. And turning into a vampire, while not necessarily game-ending, would still bar the majority of the game's content from you until you got it cured, since no one wants anything to do with a bloodsucker.

Reasons like these are why Morrowind is loved and respected by RPGamers. In many way, it does emulate the feel of a tabletop RPG. It's open enough to make you feel like you can play any kind of character you want. You can even go off the rails from what the DM had planned at the cost of him getting back at you by rendering the current campaign unwinnable with your current character.

But as I said, the game is janky as hell. And slow-paced. And its assorted systems just aren't very fun. Which is why it aged poorly for me and why I personally can't stand to play it anymore.

Oblivion is not liked but I enjoyed it. The level up system was a bit of a pain, you had to level up 2 secondary skills and one primary with different main stats in order to maximize your levelups. The mobs would scale with your level and you had to maximize your levelup or end up gimped since not all levelups make you stronger, eg. raising alchemy. If you maxed 2h swords, armor, block and strength early on you would be OP. So you would put the skills you wanted as secondary skills rather then primary since you want to have the max skills with the least levelup. This means your optimal build will have the skills you don't want maxed.

Once you got a handle on the way you level it was nice.

Another thing that I didn't like is that spells used to be OP but then they nerfed spell creation by drastically increasing mana cost for absolutely no reason, single player games should make you OP in end game, it doesn't need to be balanced.