While I agree with your general sentiment, Skyrim isn't even close to being one of the best RPG games, and it certainly is behind both Morrowind and New Vegas. Skyrim will not stand the test of time the way Morrowind did, and nobody will remember it's story the way New Vegas is remembered(people already forget Fallout 4 exists).
Not to mention that given the specific goals of equipment maintenance being put into those games(enhancing realism, justifying a skill tree outside of sporadic use, encouraging weapon variety), their absence in Skyrim is actually a detriment(especially when you consider all the other tedious junk that got put into it).
Let's be objective: whether you like skyrim or not, it's still considered a masterpiece by a wide margin of the audience as well as critics. The story may be run-of-the-mill, but it is wrapped in a really nice package of narrative, environments, and functional mechanics. None of which thankfully included weapon degradation.
As for fallout 3, fallout new vegas, morrowind and oblivion: those games are classics, sure, but let me ask you this: are they classics because of the equipment degradation, or in spite of the equipment degradation? I don't remember anyone having ever said "repairing your equipment surely adds that little touch to the game, that's why it's so perfect!".
Morrowind and Oblivion did have skill trees focused around repairing armor and weapons, sure, but since you prongs and hammers didn't cost that much and didn't weight that much, there simply was no reason to invest in those skills if not doing so just involved having to use those prongs 2-3 more times. Even in F3 and NW it just set the limit of how much damage you could repair, and the mechanic per se was still a pain in the backside. Apart from that, am I the only one finding ridiculous that a measly 10 mm pistol can degrade a set of power armor, usually designed to turn its wearer into a walking tank? And then we had the exact opposite of the spectrum, with deathclaws being capable of making your equipment unusable in 4-5 blows, which forced you to always carry a spare set of power armor along for on-field repairs, with all the ludicrousness that it entailed. But I'm digressing.
What I'm trying to say is: degrading equipment has hardly ever done anything to enhance gameplay or the fun factor, in most cases it's always been a major hassle implemented mostly for strategic reasons, as someone has already pointed out.
D:OS is neither a diablo clone where every 10 monsters you kill you get a weapon drop and you have to strategize your crawl through 10-levels-deep dungeons, nor a mmorpg where equipment degradation is a way to keep the economy in check - and guess what, even there it still doesn't work, as all those players with 400+ millions of gold coins can attest.
