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Recently I've been trying to push people to think about a variant to the skill system (just like a lot of people). Here's the variant I came up with:
Start with the Paizo Alpha 1.0 system with skill slots.
Players can also pick class skills at the lower cross-class level for a half a skill selection slot.
As players level up, they earn training points. These points are equal to half what the existing skill points are; so a rogue gets 4 per level, a fighter gets 1, etc.
After you earn eight training points, you can buy yourself a whole new skill slot. You could also spend four to get a half-class skill at the cross class rating, or buy up a half-class skill to full.
For linguistics, we set it so that you learn a new language whenever you'd get a new full class skill.
Early on I wanted to add the INT bonus into the training points, but yesterday as we tested it and rebuilt characters it became clear that that was just going to be too many points. We decided to just leave the bonus skills at first level from a high INT or the human trait, and leave it at that. This also makes increasing the INT stat retroactive for getting new skills, which everyone also liked for both simplicity and general niceness.
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So we tested it out, and here's what we found:
GOOD:
1) The condensed skills are pretty good. We're still getting used to it, but in some cases it may feel a bit too condensed.
2) Everyone is happy to be done and rid of synergies. They're arbitrary, add insane and pointless extra cross-referencing and math, and promote senseless skill splashing.
3) Tracking the new levels is nice and simple. Everyone was happy with how quickly that went.
4) Open lock needs to be under disable device. Agreement was universal there.
5) The whole training point thing worked well, although the wizards and fighters in the group were kind of bummed, but they agreed that skill monkeys need to stay skill monkeys.
6) People are more likely to snag knowledge skills and put more than a couple of points into them. Everyone liked this, because it gives them a chance to actually learn stuff without having to feed every point into more practical skills. Even professions skills got some love, which surprised me. Typically these were the "half" class skills under the mod I've been proposing, so that actually worked out really well.
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BAD:
1) Linguistics is still just odd, and doesn't quite feel right. Forgery and decipher script is good, but hammering learning additional languages into that combo skill seems clunky. I'm playing a custom setting with quite a few languages. I don't like the old system at all, but the new one is peculiar too.
2) There are no more specialists. In the past, you used to have one guy who could disable traps or pick locks and stuff. You could get yourself a skill-based niche in the party. My party is rogue-heavy now, and all of a sudden the previous lock-openers are no better than some of the other skill characters in the group. People have lost their niches.
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Overall it was good, especially the part where I can easily make NPCs now without the hell of past number crunching for skills. This is mainly due to the synergy system, which is now gone.
I'm now a lot more open to the idea of a hybrid system now, or some way of getting the niche specialties back outside of blowing a feat slot.
Even keeping points might be ok, but we just really, really need to make sure synergies stay dead and gone. The loss of the synergy boosts may require some other mechanic to get skills beefed up, for which I don't have any solid proposals yet.
Anyway, that's how our testing went. Overall it was good, still some tweaking and adjusting needed though.