Bad choice of word on my part. I meant "random" in the modern colloquial sense. I meant they were a few of those dungeons scattered about the map. They were mostly filler content, and they mostly felt like that.
I can't disagree. To be fair, I would say roughly one third of Skyrim dungeons felt samey to one extent or another - but, even so, they almost all had unique stuff to find.
The reason it worked for me, is that I never actually knew what I could expect - which is key. That's how I managed to keep my sense of wonder throughout - and the reason I could keep playing it with new characters. The sensation of not having exhausted content - which is something I feel much sooner in almost all other games out there.
Once you establish that a game only has so many tricks, it doesn't really matter how many dungeons or locations it has.
That's why I despise (purely) procedurally generated content - because not a single location feels right.
Games like No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous are perfect examples of why size and numbers mean nothing.
As much as I like games like Witcher 3 (yes, I actually like it), Gothic, Risen, Two Worlds and so on - none of those really compare to Bethsoft games when it comes to dungeon exploration.
But that's just one aspect of these games, and it all depends on what aspects you enjoy the most.
As I said, I think 100+ dungeons is way too many - and I don't need that many.
I don't actually need thousands of hours in a game.
All games represent a compromise in some way, and there's no doubt a game like Skyrim sacrificed a lot of stuff to be what it wanted to be.
Same goes for Witcher 3, by the way.