I like the idea of tiered skills, as I think they reflect reality well. Skill bloat... yes, I can see the point about a dozen variations on Perception" in RoCoII. But at the same time, I think there should always be so many skills that no one person can learn to be good at *everything* in a reasonable amount of time.
Yes, because some people (especially new gamers) want to get going fast, there should be character templates for the most common character types. That being said, I can't help sympathizing with the player (usually an old hand) who wants his character to be unique, something that hasn't been done before. To that end, I think there should be a character generation process that is very freeform, that allows you to choose which skills are easy and which ones are tough according to your character concept, however off-the-wall that concept may be.
I think the easy way to bridge the space between the two would be to show in both the templates and freeform generator that making x set of choices results in the Fighter template, making y set of choices results in the Wizard template, etc. That way by the time your player has created his 3rd or 4th character, his concept of "Kinda like a wizard, but knows his herbs and animals and stuff too. Kinda like a Druid, but uses elemental magic too." or "Kind of a cross between a Druid and a Bard.... but doesn't worship any Gods or cast any spells" already has answers starting to form in his subconscious. Or if not, the player is *seeing for himself* that it's impractical and why, rather than just putting up with a GM decree.
And as long as there is enough "skill bloat" that characters will be unable to excel in EVERYTHING, all min-maxing will do is allow players to avoid putting advantages in skill areas *their GM doesn't use anyway*.
