I agree. In Ultima 7, I was annoyed at how everything scales with CPU speed. Due to technical problems I was never able to play it on my 486 and didn't get back to the game until my Cyrix 6x86. I used Mo'slo but the fast day/night cycles were still bothersome.
On my old 386, where I had started playing the game, the day/night speed and the overall feel of the game was a lot more relaxing and immersive, but the whole game also crawled.
In Morrowind, once I found out how to change the "timescale" value, I turned it way down from default.
The problem this causes is that now you can walk very long distances before lunchtime, let alone needing to stop and camp. It might be better if the game had a variable timescale - faster in the wilderness, slower in town.
The lack of NPC schedules in Morrowind is indeed very distracting and takes away from the day/night cycle. That was the biggest flaw in the game for me.
I used a mod that tried to address this, but since there's no good way to make NPCs sleep, the result was kind of clunky. It just locks all the shops and has the owner still standing inside.
I tried to script something that would fatigue/knock out the NPCs but I ran into problems with it. I don't remember all the specifics but one issue I think was that the NPC wouldn't fall on the ground until after you entered the room. That made it pretty weird.
Never played Gothic 2 but I've watched a partial playthrough and the NPC behavior looks very good.
Weather in Morrowind just does random dice rolls I believe every 6 hours, or when you change regions. Other games feel the same way - like the weather events are just independently random coin flips, and that's probably exactly what they are.
In real life the weather goes through noticeable trends. Weather is cyclical - short cycles, medium cycles, long cycles, even longer cycles. One way to simulate it better would be to internally track some overlapping cycles and weight them against the dice rolls. I think developers underestimate the need for some sophistication in this area to make weather trends feel more real and less random.
I would love to see the weather have lasting effects on the environment in RPGs, like snow accumulation, dirt vs mud vs really sloppy mud, lake levels, health of the vegetation, maybe even animal behavior, etc.
but that's a complicated thing to accomplish and I'm not sure any game developer will ever invest the budget to try to make it happen.
It's kind of sad that game worlds still don't feel any more sophisticated than they were 30 years ago in Ultima 6, and even the Ultima series regressed at the end.