Dragon Age has the same level scaling as Oblivion, with the difference that it is not visual. Enemies will keep on wearing the same leather armour, heavy armour, whatever, but their HP and damage will be increased with you as you level up.
I also did not encounter any great quests in Dragon Age. All sidequests were inane "fetch this, kill that". At least Oblivion had some interesting side quests in the thieves guild & dark brotherhood.
Dragon Age: Origins grants you higher abilities as you level up as well as better equipment, near the end, I was killing everyone with two or one hits and didn't even need a team. Perhaps you were playing on a higher difficulty?
The quests I were playing had you tracking down Gaxkang and fighting him, breaking into properties and stealing (get this series of questline when you have the stealing skill from a man in the market place in Denerium), working for the Chantry with one quest having you join a little battle raging on and then there's the interesting companion quests. Another one had you finding bodies and chucking them down a well. While in another quest, you summon a spirit, later you see that this spirit has been causing trouble on the roads and can undertake a quest to stop him. Lots of RPGs have those fetch or kill quests - it's the way they execute them differently that makes them unique from one another.
The Dark Brotherhood in Oblivion was based of off the Keeper faction in Thief 3, so the Kudos goes to them in my opinion. Keepers in that game even wear the same clothing as the Dark Brotherhood, are experts at hiding and even have skilled assassins. The grey fox poster is just a copy of the Garret poster that you find on the walls in thief 3 as well, everything Oblivion had - I saw in Thief 3.
The mages guild just had you gaining recomandations from all major guild halls and then you get three quests in which you become the archmage. The fighters guild is pretty boring and despite the fact it is called the "fighters" guild, there wasn't much fighting.
Morrowind had more guilds if I recall and a bigger world, so Oblivion was a great fail in my opinion.
Dragon Age on the otherhand was an improvement from Mass Effect 1 as was Mass Effect 2.
