Lockpick, Speechcraft, Pickpocket, Light Armor,

technically most Perks are useless, imo.

Ok so lets say the majority of people never use Lock-picking or Speechcraft. What should Beth do with them for TES VI? Remove them from the game? The way the game is designed now I can't see them adding any complexity to it so to make these skills useful. If anything Skyrim did the exact opposite in just about everything.

Go back to Oblivion's system.

See, I'm probably the minority of the majority. I personally think Perks should be used in a way to be Special Enchancements, not replace the Attribrutes skills all together. Here we go again, X27 talking about Pathfinder.

In Pathfinder, your magic and combat is based on

Strength

Dexterity

Consitution

Intelligence

Wisdom

Charisma

Strength is how hard you can hit stuff, lift stuff, swim, and climb

Dexterity is how easily you can do acrobatics and manuever

Consitution governs health

Intelligence governs your understand, while Wisdom governs your common sense

Charisma governs how much people like you, want talk to you, and how much you can convince people with speech

As you level in Pathfinder you gain something that is called a Feat, different classes and different races how many and when you get these feats. And these feats, imo are certainly like Perks.

These feats allow you to improve upon the attribrutes above and add something to your combat. For example, Druids can turn into wild animals, so you would naturally pair it with a Feat called Natural Spell which allows a Druid to cast a spell in his Animal shape

Perks should be enhancements of what you already can do, not Be the Only Feature to Govern what You can do.

Attribrutes govern what you can do and how well you can do them

Perks enhance those attribrutes

Alchemy. I never find a use for it.

Speech is useless. None of the speech checks are really that important and by a certain level you already have a ridiculous amount of money which makes all the trading perks pointless to get.

Lockpicking. Never one single perk.

I do invest in speech if I am going to be an alchemist, because then I get the perk that allows me to sell my pots to any vendor. Very handy.

What they should have done with the Lockpicking perks is make them MUCH stronger in their effect, and make locks need the perks to be picked at all easily. This would of course go against the whole theme with Skyrim of... hmm lets call it "simplifying" so it was probably a given that they didn't do it this way but if they were going to dedicate an entire perk tree to such a secondary skill you needed to amp up the effects of having/not having the perks in said tree.

Locks by default should have worked as they do with the Thieves Guild training chests - if you don't have the perk for the specified lock level then the pick will break almost instantly on almost every pick attempt AND you lose the pick interface screen so the open position resets when you re-try your attempt. I'd say the lockpicking perks would have been a bit more useful then for those out there that have OCD when it comes to leaving behind treasure and locked chests if all the normal locks worked that way.

Haven't used speech, it just naturally gets very high aech time I talk to traders, would have liked there to be improvements in dialogue options as it was in Oblivion.

Lockpicking, I haven't needed to, once you get the knack.