The Elder Stats

So I spent about a year of on and off work on a dunmer character on skyrim, amassing over 700 hours of play time and apparently doing well enough to end up in 1st over all on the highscores.
problem is that its aparently not legit to use certain alchemy and enchantment combinations to assist with faster training, its aparently not legit to end up with doubles of quest weapons like dawnbreaker, and there was some very early on use of talking to a guy in riften about maven blackbriar to train speech prior to legendary skills and all that.

I have willingly listed everything I did that may have been an exploit on my characters bio, and intentionlly gotten the character marked with a blue star.

I am now seeking to understand where the boundaries between clever and inventive game play and leveling, and exploit and not legit leveling and game play sit.

I am fully intent on soaking up as much knowledge on this subject as fast as possible, so that I can get started on a new character as soon as possible.

My intent is to make a new level 500, with wtf stats to officially deserve the rank I had worked so hard to try and earn, but clearly and honestly do not technicly deserve.

I am sorry to anyone that I may have offended by coming out of nowhere with such high numbers and technicly assaulting the leader boards with a character that had a few minor issues with it.

I have found some general information regarding exploits at:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Glitches#Exploits

I'm still wondering if the method of obtaining peerless grade alchemy fortifying items, then using them to create a fortify enchanting potion, then using that potion to create items with fortify alchemy that exceeds peerless grade items, then using those fortify alchemy items to create a better fortify enchanting potion, up to the point where you have items that each fortify alchemy by 29% would be considered not legit.
use of this method does not seem to allow for fortification of alchemy or smithing past 29%, and fortification of bow damage, one-handed, and two-handed seem to stop at 47%.

Im also wondering if the use of a ring, amulet, head piece, and body wear, that all reduce the magicka cost in a single skill, effectivly dropping the magicka cost for a single type of spell to nothing is considered to be not legit.

Also wondering if its considered not legit to use alchemy equipment that boosts by 29% to create fortify smithing potions that increase by 130% for 30 secs.
Then using these potions in combination with self enchanted items that fortify smithing by 29% to create high damage weapons, and highly protective armor.

I am also wondering if use of spells to train in certain situations is not legit.
examples:
spamming muffle, spamming circle of protection, spamming summon dremora lord, spamming harmony in whiterun, spamming destruction spells on enemies on legendary difficulty.

I am also wondering if its considered to be not legit to reverse pickpocket a weapon (example: dragonbone sword) that you have fortified using a grinding wheel, into an enemies inventory, and then pickpocketing all their other weapons out of their inventory.
for the intended purpose of letting them hit you also to train heavy armor and light armor faster.

also wondering if its not legit to use a combination of making iron daggers, and enhancing dwarven bows to train smithing.

I know this may seem odd, but I'm also curious if cranking up the brightness on my tv to avoid using torches and light spells is considered not legit.

Any informative feedback would be greatly apreciated, as I am eager to get started on my new character and do it legit this time.

I tend to mark something "not legit" if the number seems far too high (as I've got a character that I've played for about 420 hours, I use that to kind of gauge it) or if there's a couple of what I call "flat" numbers, like exactly 1,000,000 items stolen and such. It also depends on how complete their profile is, if there's a character photo (or multiple ones) or if they just put the numbers and that was that. Having more information on a character besides just the numbers makes it a little more believable. I wasn't sure about your character initially, but I could tell it was unfinished and did not vote.

What I personally consider "legit" is anything that you can do in-game without use of the console or exploiting a glitch (like the Oghma Infinium, or the fortify restoration glitch that lets you make weapons that can do 1000 damage, or duplicating items and such). Using a "detect life" spell in a crowded area, doing the pickpocket thing like you described, letting bandits hit your shield for an hour to increase Block, making millions of iron daggers, I consider that fine. Just so long as you're not using the console to spawn a hundred people to make "detect life" even easier or spawn all the iron to make those daggers; I know some do that to level characters.
Using a spell, or blocking with your shield, or making a dagger - all using the characters and equipment you actually find in the game - is the normal way to level, it's just that you're doing it multiple times in a row.