Talents and Flaws are typically something life changing.
For the big ones, yeah. But a +5 to your basket weaving skill (or any skill) is not "life changing." It is a minor (very, very minor) boost in a single skill.
Listen, none of what I said, says you shouldn't have an in-game reason for the talent. I prefer good character backgrounds that include all sorts of stuff, but I am not going to make them come up with a mystical/genetic/god-touched-me-personally reason to have a +5 or +10 in a skill. Many of the talents are "self-explainatory" in how a character got them, with very little tweeking needed to apply it to
this character specifically.
I just never got that idea to be worried about "super" characters in RM, so the talents and flaws in Character Law were almost always fair game. (I was just perusing the old Cloudlords of Tanara module, and in the back of it where they talk about adventuring there, they list it by levels. when they got to the 11-15th level, it said, "PCs at this level are probably getting hard to handle, and depending upon how stocked with magic items they are, they could be a problem." Only to later also say this: "The final confrontation with (edit specific name for TM purposes) could be interesting as well - the PCs might even stand a chance of survival."
I couldn't imagine characters powerful enough at 20th level to not be able to threaten/challenge them, none-the-less at 11-15th level. I think this is the deep set thinking that has guided RM over the years, practically off the cliff: Powerful PCs = Bad. I am here to tell you, that is not so, and I firmly believe that if ICE goes away from that thinking, they will get more customers. (Even if it means some of the old guard leaves.)
As a GM, I want my players* to have characters that are totally cool and awesome. The youngster that is capable, because of natural talent (read: talents) of becoming one of the best in whatever field they happen to choose. I don't generally want to run a bunch of dirt farmers who will barely be able to survive going further than 5-miles from their dirt farm. For me, epic sagas are the best storylines. (Which is probably why I like full novels and big series and not short stories, which have a tendancy to be tragic. I guess tragedy is more "artsy" and meaningful, so I will stick with mundane and meaningless, thank you very much.) In order to have big stories, you need to have "big" heroes. I guess if you can get that dirt farmer to survive to 30th level, they will be big time. But, in RM, that is nearly an impossible task. (Yes, I know that the harder something is, the more rewarding it is to succeed, but I don't want to have to go through 20 characters failures in order to get the 1 success.) So, you get talents, and more attribute points in order to be a more capable character, have more survivability (which I think also helps the longevity of a campaign), and a much greater chance of being epic.
*Provided the player also wants this. If they want to play a complete nincompoop, they can; likely they will be playing many of them, one after the other, though.
PS: Yeah, RM 1 and 2 had flaws built right into the talents, and that is probably one of the main reasons I switched to RMSS/FRP.