doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Interesting. All I can say is that was not my experience. Maybe my DM at the time wasn't incorporating skills as written, or maybe you or your DM(s) have stressed it? To me it seemed very detached from the way that feats, powers, and spells had this interconnected cascading or domino effect. We used the cards, and I just remember rearranging them frequently based on what feat was going to enable the use of what class power, etc., and that skills rarely seemed to play into that.
I mean that specific aspect of combat, I suppose it could be easy to forget the combat uses of skills, but every single skill had at least situational combat use, even if you didn't take anything to get more out of them.
But yeah, skills affect out of combat challenges more, just like attack powers affect combat more.