Thanee, the slight disassociation between skills and abilities is intentional - a high Agility makes it easier to quickly increase fighting, but it's still possible to build a perfectly competant character who uses a few Agility skills without actually training up Agility that high.
By more tightly coupling abilities to skills, you're unnecessarily restricting the available "character space" and substantially messing with some of the Legendary tier Edges that give you the ability to do some of the things.
Also, initiative is many things, but a crap shoot it's not - Quick, Level Headed, Improved Level Headed, and a power I'm forgetting at the moment can substantially alter your fortunes. Initiative is just random enough to keep players on their toes and excited about the next round being dealt.
For those reading the thread who haven't played SW yet, the take-home message is this: SW works great as written, and doesn't require extensive house ruling. Really!
When I first saw the system I immediately started thinking of house rules to "fix" things, but after playing the game for the better part of a year, I see that it's a fairly robust design that doesn't really need house rules unless you want something genre-specific (high noon duels for a western, superhero strength to toss people, etc).
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