Yes, you do.
I wrote before that I thought D&D was stereotyping heroes as being great in combat, but because there was so much combat in D&D, that I didn't think it was an unfair stereotype.
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I think Lore has to compromise between assumptions and flexibility. I think anything is possible mechanically, but adventures are built with some default assumptions.
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The point is that "Lore" trust the DMs and players, doesn't coddle them. It shows you a cliff and says you probably don't want to go too close to the edge, but it doesn't actually put up a railing except by social contract.
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In short, the assumptions of non-lopsided combat ability are built into published adventures and encounter design, NOT into the rules for character creation.
The first two paras in what I've quoted are frequently asserted by 4e players as well, only with "adventuring" in place of combat. I think, in this thread, it was [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] who said that a high level wizard has done a lot of adventuring, and therefore gets better at it (including +15 to open doors). And I made the point that I think the 4e designers were motivated not by ignorance of lopsided builds, but by a view that they wanted the rules to exclue them in order to make adventures work.
And if the thoughts in the second two paras that I've quoted are right, they seem to be as applicable to combat as to skills. (I think - more on this below.)
All versions of D&D, including 4e, have used distinctive action resolution mechanics for combat. But 4e, with its non-lopsidedness in both skills and combat, comes the closest to uniformity across combat and skills on the character building side. I'm arguing that if "Lore" is to meet your design specs, it needs to come closer to 4e in respect of this uniformity (to avoid the "stereotyping"/forcing that you are objecting to in 4e) but presumably via points rather than level scaling (to permit the possibility of lopsidedness that you want).
All that said, I can think of three reasons to differentiate combat and skills in respect of permissible lopsidedness.
One would be that combat is (potentially) lethal for PCs in a way that door-opening is not, and so a playable game really does require a minimum buffer on every PC. My own view is that "Lore" might do better to look at ways of making losing at combat less guaranteed to be lethal (this ties into the Roles thread!).
A second would be that combat is such a ubiquitous element of play, compared to other adventuring challenges, that a playable game requires all PCs to be able to participate in combat even if they suck at opening doors. My own view is that this is probably true for most D&D play, but on the other hand the 4e critics have tended to attack 4e for relying on a similar thought to justify the intricacy of its combat action resolution compared to its non-combat action resolution.
A third woud that "D&D has alwasy done it this way".
I think that a "Lore" built on the basis of the second or third of these reasons is pretty unlikely to pick up simulationist/immersive players of the classic simulationist rulesets. But a Lore built as I'm urging, in defiance of the first reason and permitting lopsided combat builds and making the action resolution rules to some extent tolerant of them (as they are tolerant of lopsided non-combat builds), would be pretty different in feel from what D&D has tended to be, I think.
A separate point about lopsidedness, which [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION] has mentioned (I think) with reference to Burning Wheel - the more narrow the gap across expected DCs, the easier lopsidedness is to cope with both in world design and adventure design. (BW has other features to make lopsidedness work, too, like giving players a strong mechanical incentive, via its advancement rules, to try challenges at which their PCs have no chance of success.)
But D&D, especially since 3E, has emphasised big gaps across high and low level PCs, and big gaps in expected DCs in the gameworld, between mundane DC 15 doors and heavenly DC 40 doors. This makes lopsidedness a bigger problem in adventure design and execution. It also, in my view, puts more pressure on the verisimilitude of lopsidedness. It's one thing to have my scrawny wizard adventuring with Conan. But what is my scrawny wizard doing hanging out with Heracles in the heavens, in danger of getting squashed by any wandering inhabitant? I think this is the thought that 4e relies on to make scaling rules, designed in the first instance with playability in mind, nevertheless fit roughly into a verisimilitudinous high fantasy world. (And it needs to be remembered that 4e still permits a high degree of lopsidedness, because of the role that training, feats, items and stats play in skill bonuses. It's just not lopsidedness to the extent of scrawny mage hanging out with Heracles.)
To conclude: while noting your caution about predicting the market!, I'll make a prediction anyway. A "Lore" edition that distinguishes between combat and non-combat as far as lopsidedness is concerned, and that permits scrawny wizards to hang out in heaven with Heracles, looks to me not so much like a generally targetted simulationist edition, but an edition aimed at the particular sensibilities of 3E/PF players. Which is fine as far as it goes, but I think raises the issue of "why will those players switch from what they're playing?" And this is where I think the sandboxing idea has some merit.
My own preferred "Lore" edition, on the other hand, is closer to genuine purist-for-system simulation. But can such a game be built that will have widespread traction with 3E/PF players? I don't know, but I do have doubts. I think that some of those elements of 3E/PF that depart from purist-for-system ideals may be precisely what those players are looking for.
