Even as a GM, I have a love-hate relationship with skill points. I want to utilize all the skills, especially if someone's invested into it, but I don't to penalize the players for not putting skill points into a particular skill, after all there are only so many skill points especially if you only get two from your class. I also have to hold myself back from fudging the DC for a skill when someone who has invested heavily into a skill misses a DC by one. Then there are the spikes of effectiveness a skill can take from none to one (if there's a class skill, skill focus, or feat that improves the skill) and from nine to ten (feats affecting skills).
tl;dr - As much as I love skills, the skill point system bugs me as both a player and a GM.
Then it hit me. Why don't I just get rid of the skill point system and convert all the skills into feats? Classes would get free skill-feats. Theoretically, all feats would have a progression: novice, regular, expert, master. Each level should allow more abilities, and boost one's capability by a significant amount and may even allow the character to get auto success on certain actions. Characters should be able to make ability checks on any skill barring trained skills.
For example, if there is a feat called novice swimmer, while a normal character might have to make a strength check to cross a slowly moving river, someone with novice swimmer could swim across the river without issue and if they make some other check that involves swimming (such as dragging out a drowning party member) they could make a strength check at a significantly reduced DC.
Anyway, just throwing ideas out there.
I would talk to the players. Burning feats on skills would not make many players that I know happy, and as a player it would only make me volunteer to GM.
Use take 10 more. Don't request rolls for actions that you know should succeed and the PCs chance of failing them is lower than 50%. Maybe introduce something like rogue's skill mastery from D&D Next - when rolling a skill check natural rolls of 9 or less are treated as 10, before applying modifiers. This rule could apply to skill checks with skills favored by class or for which Skill Focus were picked.
I agree with wraithstrike that feats are precious commodity and many players would prefer not to spend them on skills to be decent at performing actions covered by those skills.
That's why I said free skill-feats AKA extra feats. It would just be stupid to turn all the skills into feats and not give the players more feats to use on this since they no longer have the skill points. Anyway I was tired when I wrote this, so it might have not been clear.
I had also planned to give some classes the skill-feats as part of the progression if it is an important part of their class, for example Bards would get Perform and the advancements in it.
The idea was to set it so that all things an average human is capable of, can be made on an untrained roll.
There are still issues with this idea, but I don't think it's the "burning of feats" since I'm giving more feats.
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Maybe instead of making those "extra feats" just adds skill rank thresholds that would grant auto-success on certain checks when having a specific number of ranks in particular skill (so rank 1 would be equivalent to your proposed Novice Skill feat, rank 3 would be Regular Skill, rank 5 Adept rank 7 Expert, rank 10 Master or however you would like the thresholds to be). I admit that I like skill ranks myself and don't want them to be completely gone. One of the things I strongly disliked in 4th edition was turning skills into feats granting +5 to particular check.
