About min-maxing: Teenage-me made the mistake of discovering that the vendor economy in Morrowind is fundamentally broken. Basically, the base price that vendors will buy and sell something for goes down when they like you more and up when they like you less. There's also a spread affected by this too, which should compensate for that, but if you max out the mercantile skill, then that spread is narrowed enough that you can buy something for cheap, make the vendor like you less, and then sell back the same thing at a profit due to the now increased base price. Luckily, making a highball sell offer offends the vendor in a way that will make them dislike you, but only for as long as the current conversation lasts. This means if you first bribe vendors to max out their affection toward you, then after that it's possible to buy their whole stock for cheap, temporarily offend them to increase their prices, then sell them everything back at a profit, end the conversation, then rinse and repeat. This way you can farm the vendors for all their gold.

You have to wait a while for the vendors' inventory and gold reserves to reset - luckily one thing you can use all that gold for is paying trainers to improve your skills, after which you'll be able to level up if you sleep (handily resetting the vendors). With the right trainers, it's possible to always improve enough major and minor skills together before sleeping, that you power level, gaining the maximum stats per level.

The first real city you get to, Balmora, has trainers that cover every single skill I cared about (maybe all of them?) and enough vendors to supply you with plenty of gold to pay the trainers. I made a "circuit" of the city, where I would run around farming vendors and paying trainers, then sleeping to level up. After doing this for a couple hours, I'd already leveled up more than the game expected me to do at all - enemies didn't seem to scale all the way up there that well, and because I'd consistently powerleveled, my stats were super high too. I still completed the game, but it wasn't all that challenging, felt more like a sandbox to play god in.