You're preaching to the choir here. Even my players understood the number of skills in GURPS is simply the natural result of having a universal set of rules designed to cover, well, everything.
There are specific decisions in the development of
GURPS that contributed beyond simply being a universal system.
- By making each weapon type a separate (if interrelated, through defaults) skill, it leaves open the question of 'but what if I just throw a rock/drop a brick/etc.?' necessitating 'combat' skills like Throwing, Dropping, etc.
- Certain (usually physical) actions are gated by base or secondary attributes, but you can be better at those things than your raw attributes would indicate. And those are governed by skills like leaping, lifting, running, etc.
- GURPS works hard to distinguish between similar people and make sure that Person A not meant to do what Person B does genuinely can't do so (at least at the same score), whereas another system might just let them both be able to, trusting that you won't be using A to do B-like things. Someone who is good at using electronic devices isn't necessarily good at building/repairing them, and thus you have electronics and electronics operation skills. A computer programmer isn't necessarily a hacker, etc.
The first two one can see counter examples in the similar system
Champions/Hero System. In it, there is a base combat score and weapon proficiencies, so unusual attacks like dropping/throwing have a default system in place. Likewise, being better at jumping than your raw attributes would be gated by directly increasing jumping distance (which is basically increased attribute, with an 'only while jumping' qualification). I don't know the history of the games that well, but I always figured it was because
Champions had combat as a central theme with the rest of the skill system starting as a vestigial add-on; whereas
GURPS started (or at lest distinguished itself from
Melee/Wizard/TFT) with the skill system as a central component.
The third (which
Hero System also has, to a varying degree) is tied to at least two factors. One the notion of making any kind of character -- even one that would never be an adventurer. The other is the artificial economy of character points -- if both computer programmers can be good hackers, either the non-hacker character is paying for something they won't use, or you let them do it without paying and then it 'isn't fair.'
It has lead to criticisms of the system by some of my group that it prioritizes being a 'highly granular fictional person generator' more than it does facilitating play, and that it is beholden to a false notion of 'balance.' However, I think in general these are looking-for-problem critiques. More realistically (for us), GURPS is generally just a complex system well past the time in our lives when we have the free time to commit to it.
It's still a bit overwhelming for those new to GURPS and I see similar problems in other games with much fewer rules. When I ran my first Trail of Cthulhu campaign, one of the players was shocked that Architecture was such a frequently used skill. In ToC, Architecture is used to figure out where hidden rooms are and other oddities of a building. Very useful in a Cthulhu type game.
Okay, I like that. One of my own complaints about the game was that there were huge long lists of real world skills, but many of them do feel like they are there simply as
'to represent a lifelong user of this skill, put more points here than someone who represents a novice' with little actual use-mechanisms for the skills. More of this (well communicated, so that people actually take them) would make the non-adventuring professional skills much more useful to the game.
