[quote=Dervish]
The Snow Elves agreed to eat a fungus that would make them blind as a condition of the dwemer housing and protecting them from the wrath of the Nords, who were hell bent on wiping them out. Countless years of torture and slavery broke them into the degenerate horrors you see in the game. It had nothing to do about being shaped by the environment itself, but rather by the machinations of the dwemer.Also, in Dawnguard, you meet which might be the very last two Snow Elves in Tamriel. The one tells you pretty much what happened to his people. Most of the surviving Snow Elves were slaughtered by the feral falmer in the end, and I doubt the falmer are going to figure out how dwemer technology works, let alone create it, since most researchers from intelligent, non-feral races barely understand the scope of their designs.
[/quote]

Yeah I just learned that top part when I was looking up the names of those two snow elves... (why I made the edit lol :p)

Though they aren't the last of their kind since I remember there being some mention of a village/colony of the remaining snow elves somewhere else in Tamriel. Though for that final part, the Falmer were slaves of the Dwemer and worked for them for a long time so while they might not be intelligent to the other races I do believe that they might know than the other races since they were the closest... not to mention that the other races have not only few people interested in the dwemer technologies, but that few are also kept at bay thanks to the dwemer creations while the Falmer continuously live in those ruins and don't really have much to worry about when it comes towards the dwemer traps and machines since they already have a rebuilt society INSIDE those ruins. I'm not saying that it'll take days but I do think that around the next 200-500 Years of living in the dwemer cities, they should learn rather quickly and become advanced enough to at least mimic some of those technologies. It'll be a very slow and long process but I think it'll eventually happen if we don't have the Dragonborn come in and wipe them all out of every Dwemer ruins first.

After all, there is a huge difference between a hand full of researchers who can't even get inside where they NEED to be, and are basically standing in a good, far distance studying, and several cities full of a tribal race living inside those cities and stand right next to those machines. The chances of the latter learning something from the dwemer ruins just seems a lot higher than the few scientists on the out side in my opinion. :/