Oblivion's has better art direction and it's clear Bethesda really put in some real effort to make it look good. Different menus look radically different from one another in terms of art elements, and it really makes it feel like it's a UI meant for a fantasy game.
Skyrim's UI looks like dogshit, a percussor to all the modern flat UIs we see nowadays. It's absolutely soulless and it looks like something an intern threw together in Excel in an afternoon.
You're missing the point entirely. It is useful, and games can benefit from having a secondary inventory screen to display items this way. What I am getting at is that Bethesda games
need an Excel spreadsheet because they drown the player in so many items.
I wouldn't complain as much if they had fully embraced a simulationist approach, but is there really any reason a player should be able to pick up every spoon and fork they come across, or bowls, or any other useless item you can think of when they serve zero purpose in the game beyond allowing you to sell them for a partly sum in games where the economy breaks after a few hours? Would the game really be any worse if you weren't able to pick up all the clutter?