The AL adventures are structured such that the optimal approach is to use a combat-monster, with all non-combat stuff either being strictly optional or being handled without recourse to the mechanics, and so those are the characters you'll see at the table.
5e's ruling-over-rules and bounded accuracy signatures do encourage resolving things with RP rather than mechanics, which a lot of folks love, I know, but which does leave open the option to sacrifice anything you can snow your way through without reference to mechanics (mostly meaning bypassing checks), so as to maxx the few things you can't (mostly combat and casting).
Skill challenges took a bit of finesse to get right. They had a few problems:
Maybe I wasn't doin' it by the book, but:
The lack of action economy let one highly-skilled character run the whole thing
Just go around the table, everybody makes a check.
Ending on three failures was both statistically a poor decision and incentivized min-maxing, not RP choices
Statistically it beat the unholy heck out of the original
n successes before
n/2 failures, which actually got easier the greater the value of
n, the opposite of what 'greater complexity' was supposed to represent.
Insufficient detail / structure left players to just haphazardly guess what the right solution was
I sometimes feared the opposite, that they could be a little too structured & prescriptive. I was always sure to point out that the player could make a case for any skill if he had an idea that didn't fit the structure.
Failure without advancing the plot led to a "nope, try again" approach to failure that is not fun.
This is one where I thought the 3-failure approach worked really well. One failure, add a complication or resource loss. Two, add another or pile on the first. Three, things go badly wrong, resources/opportunities are lost and "
fail forward."
However, part of the problem with AL adventures is that they're generally not allowed to include enemies that cannot be defeated via combat, so combat becomes a weakly optimal strategy.
Combat emphasis may be in part a problem with the adventures, but it's also an issue with the system. Like most RPGs, D&D still simply has a lot of rules devoted to combat, making it seem important. They're also less DM-dependent rules, which means that you expect to have more consistent impact if you emphasize combat than if you emphasize checks (which the DM may essentially gloss over by narrating success with no roll, or undermine by narrating failure with no roll). There's just not a lot of 'meat' to the process of resolving something via checks, while there is some with combat. Bounded accuracy also makes checks less character-defining. You have to be careful to limit the opportunity to make a check to the player who declares the action or asks the question first, otherwise the 'pile on' effect will make checks more of a random event than a chance for the guy who's actually good at the particular check to shine.
