doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
In principle I agree. Certainly there's uneccessary overlap. What does Acrobatics do that Dexterity(Athletics) doesn't?
But skills in 5E just don't do enough for that to be worth the trouble. To have a reasonable chance of achieving something you need both Ability Mod and Proficiency.
In 4E skills added +5 and that's the minimun number necessary to have skills have meaningful impact. (Because DCs scale by 5 - so an increase of +5 means you can now hit a higher category of DC for the same roll).
In practice I find that if you start moving around skills and ability scores you just take reliability away from the players. Ability scores come first. So if the Cleric player takes Insight because he has a high Wisdom - it doesn't help him much if he is then asked to roll Charisma (Insight) -- the ability score is where the weight in the system is (at least until quite high levels).
You could probably just drop skills entirely and say to players pick 2 ability scores and have proficiency in all skill checks with those scores and the game wouldn't really play appreciably different (You'd lose the illusion of choice - which is not nothing - but it is mostly an illusion).
In any case the system is vestigial enough that you can remove the skills - replace them with 13th Age style backgrounds, or just sub in a new skill list entirely and nothing will really break.
DCs scale by 5? Pretty sure the DM sets DCs, and in published modules being proficient certainly makes a difference. As for the idea of losing skills and picking two attributes instead...if the game wouldn’t play very, very, differently for you with that change, you and I are playing very different games.