I'm glad to see that it's gone in RMC, since it was gone in my campaign anyways
As others have pointed out, chargen was rather complicated enough, so last thing I wanted to do was have my players go through level 0, level 1, then prespend for level 2. It made the most sense for us to just spend it as we earned the level. However, the GM *always* had final approval on earned skills. The player had to effectively justify the skills he'd earned from his adventuring. To use your example, if for the entire past level the character was crossing a dessert, the GM wouldn't allow any DPs to be spent on sailing.
As an interesting variant on leveling rules, I played in one campaign where it was effectively "level-less". Effectively, after using a skill, you would roll the dice to see if your skill increased by 1. The formula was:
OpenEnded Roll + (100 - CurrentBaseSkill) + StatBonus
If you got > 100, you increased your skill by 1. If you got < 0, you lost 1 on your skill. This formula made it more and more difficult to get to 100 in a skill (and extremely difficult to get over 100). You got to roll this I think once a "game-day" (or might have been game-week, can't remember) based on the skill you used (so you couldn't pick a lock 1000 in one day and max out your skill), and also after any combat sessions, you would see what weapons you used and you'd roll on those skills. If you took *any* damage in the combat, you got to roll for Body Development. And I think that was how levels were finally earned. Every 5 pts of Body Development you earned, you increased a level (you have to have levels for StatGains and ResistanceRolls). And lastly, you got 5 "free" rolls every game-month to indicate hobbies and things you've been practicing during the month.
Was an interesting system, but definately not very casual...
-shnar