I stumbled upon this mod -
SPERG that I highly recommend you check out. I love ACE, but after looking at SPERG I'm now trying it out and will very likely stay with it. It doesn't have as many endorsements as the bigger ones, but it has a decent-sized fanbase. It's biggest appeal to me was how closely it stayed true to vanilla perks while attempting to fix what was boring or broken.
- Automatic perks. Basically, when you level up a skill, you get the boring passive talents (like +20% block, +10% 1h damage, + 20% sneak) automatically. This is similar to Cataclysm revamped talent trees philosophy. Boring but essential power perks are now baked into your skill level, so you can spend your points on other perks.
- Many meh perks were merged, so you only spent one point to get, say, 3 vanilla perk effects. All old vanilla perks are still present.
- Modular. If you don't like certain perk or effect (like automatic perks), you can turn them off.
It's not a perfect mod - for example, not sure if they fixed exploits - but you can supplement that with other mods that do fix the exploits for example. The readme is a giant wall of text worth reading. Definitely worth a look if you like the ideas from this author.