That matches my experience as well. There are actually relatively few skills that make sense to max out, and most of those involve opposed checks. And there is a tension between wanting to max out those skills and also wanting to get advantages from getting at least some skill in useful skills.
There were a ton of skills where having 5 ranks was really nice. And if you were like me, you threw a lot of little 'make skill check or be mildly debuffed/inconvenienced' problems at the players with a DC of between 5 and 10, that encouraged investing in skills or at the least rewarded builds that had them without overly punishing those that didn't.
There are some issues with how conservative the writers were in granting benefits to the player for being skilled, and with the skill system not being really integrated into the rest of 3e, and with spells granting skill way too easily in some cases. And the Profession skill is poorly thought out. And the Craft skill needs an improved crafting system to tie into. And there is a little bit too much elegance, which can be for example seen in kludging the 'Jump' into the system as a skill with a D20 skill check when jumps really don't work like that. And I think Pathfinder has a nice fix for one of the problems with cross class skills. And so forth. It's not perfect.
But the 5e system is such a big step backwards and so generally inferior to the 3e system in almost every way, that it's probably one of the biggest reasons I didn't adopt 5e. Bounded accuracy may work fine for simulating combat abstractly, but it's pretty lousy applied to a lot of other things. It's pretty clear that the 5e system isn't really intended to be a generic action resolution system, and that it's only intended to handle stunts performed under pressure, usually with binary pass/fail resolution only, and with comparatively little concrete guidance as to what is actually performed by an action or how hard it is to do it. And that's to not even get really into the problem that the system is so PC centric, that the DM is forced to just assume NPCs work by different rules. In other words, it assumes all the fun of the game is in the Combat/Challenge pillar (gamist aesthetics) and not so much in the Exploration pillar (simulationist aesthetics). And I like my tactical combat and tense action as much as the next guy, but I'd just play an isometric cRPG if that was all really got out of table top gaming.