I'm in love with Ebony armor by now. I've produced two full suits, one for me one for my little home-hugging servant, and I've enough Ebony ingots in storage to make at least 3 more full legendary-grade suits with a variety of weapons. Also have several Ebony weapons lying around or on display, though I use a health-drain greatsword and a soul-steal one-handed sword in the field.
Ebony weapons are in general sexy too. Exceptions beign the one-handed mace, two-handed axe and the one-hander "sword" - it looks more like a metalic beating-stick with a sharp end to it. Once my enchanting get's good enough to dual-enchant I'll add stamina-drain to my two-handed decapitation instrument.
While I've in general really enjoyed Skyrim despite a few bugs and annoying factors like the apparent need to join god and every man to beat the story-line, (I'm opposed to that on general principle, only one master etc.) I'm not entierly sure I'll manage to make more characters that are significantly different from my Ebony-clad seeker-of-ultimate-skill-and-power, simply becasue I'm madly in love with two-handed battle and Ebony gear in general. I did skill up to Dragonbone and made a suit of full-plate and scale-mail light armor because I could. I'm corrently debating selling this because frankly, only the scale-mail dragon-bone suit looked any good, and my toon has exactly zero skill in light armor...
What I'd love was, for materials to be tiers like they are now, but for all advanced above-steel materials to have light and heavy suits available for production. Ebony is automatically heavy and Elven is light - what if I wanted an Elven-mail clad heavy armor user, or a light Ebony suit for my ranger-type toon? Above leather and scale all you got in the way of light is Elven, Glass and Dragon Scale. That seems a bit thin. The Dwemer had no clue how to make ligt armor and 100% of their force were heavily armoured or dressed in robes... I guess whatever scouts they had used cloth, then.
All that remains now is to get to max level with this one toon while upping enchanting, magical destruction/restoration skills, gather the money I need to keep buying every Ebony ingot I see along with basic-level smithing mats, and swallowing my annoyance with the main story and go on, even if I'll end in serving the Thieves guild, Dark Brotherhood, etc etc etc.
Anyone who's done all the story answer me on this; Are you forced, by story, to join any organizations, and once the big bad is dead does the game stop? Can you go about messing around after, or?