It's quite likely you encountered some discussion of one or more of them.
Less likely, but still plausible, is that you came up with the core concept the same way that Mike Pondsmith did... by thinking outside the box. I don't know if Robin Laws was familiar with CF.
Steffan O'Sullivan also had a similar option for FUDGE back before it was published commercially by Grey Ghost. I don't recall if it hits GGP's edition. (and am too lazy to check the storage for my dead tree). He's mentioned the open paragraph mode on RPGG a couple times.
Oh, and fudge uses 6-sided dice... with one of several rolling methods
4df (+, +, =, =, - -), essentially read numerically as (+1, +1, +0, +0, -1, -1) (-4 to +4, bell-curved.)
2d6-7 (-5 to +5 bilinear) or 1d6-1d6 (same -5 to +5 bilinear)
2 good and 2 bad dice, keeping the lowest, 6's read as 0, and matches of good to bad die are discarded. (convoluted, bell curved, strongly zero centric)
Note also: Fate uses fudge as a baseline, but adds aspects from IIRC Polaris. Fudge was online in the early 90's, including posted as a .ps file on alt.rec.frp.misc ... this was before PDF had caught on at all, and it was a proprietary format, so page-layout docs circulated in TeX and in .ps formats for windows and mac.