I don't understand; if you don't want to use game mechanics to judge what happens in social situations, why do you want game mechanics?
"More refined" "dynamic" don't descriptive what you want at all; they are generally positive sounding adjectives that carry next to no meaning.
What are "player development choices"?
Player development choices are the choices the players make to develop their characters with finite resources, meaning that one PC cannot do everything. In short, getting players involved in developing their PCs over time, rather than "I put six points into Char, I'll do the talking'.
Dynamic and refined, well, let's take an easy murder scene. The PCs need to solve a murder. They have a body in a room, median room temperature, cold night outside, body has developed lividity and five to six joint rigor. Cause of death appears to be systematic shock brought on by organ damage from stab wounds. You have signs of forced entry at the room door and one window, minor damage to a free-standing table, defensive wounds on the corpse's outer left arm. A rune cut into the victim's forehead precludes raising or communication with dead.
Pretty straight forward and simple, but all you have in terms of skills is Investigation, Medicine for the autopsy, and perhaps Survival for checking for tracks outside the window. Toss in a Perception roll or two, and that's it. Two, maybe three skill rolls, and you can be sure that every group is going to have a proficiency and high stat in each. There is zero player involvement, no incentive to learn and improve skills,
But with narrower-application skills, you can feed the players the bits of evidence singly (perhaps with a failed or less successful roll to create uncertainty as to the value of a piece of data), and then the players have to assemble the bits of information into a whole.
