I don't know for sure what the new skill system will look like, but I have memeries of the old.

Every playthrough after the 1st In both Fallout 3 and Fallout: NV went the same for many players in the early stage of the game. In Fallout 3 everyone would make a mad dash to Rivet City to grab the intelligence bobblehead and in Fallout NV, everyone would grab a pair of Snowglobes and/or gamble in the casino's to buy the Intelligence implant all the while avoiding every singel quest and battle possible in order to avoid leveling up and loosing possible skill points. Oh and unless you make a low INT character for the Lolz, you also always took The educated perk at 4th level.

I think that increases to intelligence should retroactively award you skill points the next time you level up. If the final system depends on Intelligence that is.

But no matter what the final system turns out to be, the players final stats should not be determined by how soon they find a specific item, or do a specific quest. In a way it kind of takes away from the "Sandbox" feel of things.

A stat increase should be meaningful no matter what level you get it. Wheather at level 2 or level 50

I thought that skills were gone myself, but when they talked about the level scaling (rubberbanding) I knew that they must have either kept Skills or introduced something else that completely replaces it. Else you wouldn't need level scaling.

We still have perks

It's probably going to go a lot like Skyrim, with points assigned to acquire upgrades at level. We'll probably get to "tag" things early on, though.

I don't think most players played like that... probably just seems that way since it becomes the popular topic of conversation once discovered after the first playthrough. But that's what subsequent playthroughs are for.. to simply experiment with character builds. I've always had more fun playing characters with serious disadvantages rather than perfect builds. The most wonky character build I came up for in New Vegas was to take the traits Claustrophobic and Early Bird.. and then take the perks Solar Powered and Night person.. My stats were just constantly changing and depending on the time of day or area I was in could make things much easier or much more difficult.