All the playtesting/balancing/rules-chaning threads are closed. Browswe-only.
As to your point, yeah, I agree fully, and not just to the "nurture" classes either.
The D&D fighter is a moron. He is all muscle and no brain. He gets 2 skill points and a tiny little list of class skills. Obvious skills that a fighter in a real world would want are omitted from his class list because he's expected to be a moron.
Why can't a fighter be good at Acrobatics? Erol Flynn? Pirates clambering around and fighting in their ship's rigging? Three Musketeers?
Why can't a fighter be good at Escape Artist? Especially in a world full of monsters that grapple, spells that grapple, and bad guys that grapple? This is a life-or-death skill for anyone who finds himself standing close enough to a monster to hit that monster with a sword.
Why can't a fighter be good at Heal? Real earth history is full of soldiers who have been called upon to bandage a fallen comerade, to stabilize him long enough to get him to a real healer (medic). Why can't D&D fighters do this too?
Of course, none of that is backwards-compatible, and none of it will appear in Pathfinder for that very reason.
But it might make for some fine house rules.
Why can't a fighter be good at Perception? In a world full of ambushing monsters, deadly assassins, lurking bandits, and dangers around every dungeon corridor, being able to spot trouble before it kills you is critical.
If it were me, those 4 skills would all be class skills for a fighter.
And, if he's going to have a fairly ample list of class skills, then 2 skill points per level is insufficient.
Even if we don't expand the list of class skills available to the fighter, even if we are OK saying a wandering, lute-playing minstrel is harder to grapple than a fighter, then all we're really saying is fighters shouldn't get the +3 class bonus on these skills.
Either way, I feel they should still get a larger number of skill points so they can be reasonably competent, with or without that bonus, on skills that will keep them, and their comerades, alive.
And this doesn't apply to just fighters. Barbarians need these skills for the same reason (they get Perception). So do rangers, paladins, and monks (each of whom get some but not all of this list).
I think clerics should get Bluff as a class skill, but maybe that's just my atheism rearing it's ugly head. Either way, they definitely should get Intimidate and Perform (Oratary).
Everyone should get Heal. Anyone crazy enough to leave the relative safety of the walled cities to risk their lives in deep dungeons and vast wildernesses should be smart enough to learn to heal, and should want to be good at it.
Everyone should get Ride. It's not the modern world where only a tiny percentage of people know how to ride a horse/camel/elephant etc. This is a world where everyone rides to get anywhere. Everyone. Especially adventurers, who go out into the far reaches of the world, their only reliable transportation being their steeds, yet so many of them are clueless as to how to ride those steeds.
And why are skill points always in multiples of 2? Are we afraid of odd numbers?
I think someone on another thread had my favorite suggestion:
Give all classes a number of skill points per level equal to 1/3 the number of class skills they have.
This would give the RAW moron fighters 3 points per level, or the slighly improved version with my additional skills would get 4 points per level.
Bards would be the big winner at 9 points per level.
Wizards would really be the big winners with 5 skill points per level, a whopping 250% increase from RAW.
Rogues would suffer a little, dropping down to 7 points per level. And since they're supposed to be skill monkeys, reducing their skill points is more destructive to their class concept than reducing any other class. So we would probably need to make them the one exception, holding them stable at 8, or maybe even nudging them up to 9 so the bard won't "upstage" them.