Both and neither.
At heart, I really just don't care about "feeling powerful." I don't think about this game that way, or any other game that is somewhere in the ballpark of an RPG. Power fantasies are not and have never been the focus of RPGs; their focus is character and story. The more a game looses sight of that, the less of an RPG it is and the more of an action game it is. And to be fair, many of the "RPGs" that are mainstream are designed more as action games with RPG elements. ESO is certainly one of those games, so it's fair that the "feeling powerful" thing is a drive for some players of this game. It's not my thing. Neither of these approaches would really benefit me as a player because they don't deal with why I play this game.