Yeah as Mike said, the default faces and skin is harsh.  I realize that these characters generally are rugged Viking types, but even so, they were all beaten profusely with the ugly stick.

I think you will enjoy Skyrim much more if you have a setup where you are capable of modding it.

There are two side effects of modding though that you have to be careful with.  First is that mods often require a general load order to be applied, particularly if you have many.  There are some tools to automatically sort your mods and it catches most of them.

Another is an issue with scripting.  If you use lots of mods and lots of mods with scripts, first you can get save game bloat because a ton of info is stored in scripts.  Papyrus scripts can make skyrim unstable or corrupt your save games.

You just have to be picky and try to keep some "vanilla" saves as backups.  There are steps to make clean saves but they aren't always 100%.

Skyrim is also fairly bad at memory management.  You get a ton of mods going and there can be instability just from memory issues.  Running an enhancement system called SKSE can help a lot, particularly if you use the memory switches.

I've been modding since last November, so I'm full of useless nerd info.

.