» Fri Jun 29, 2012 11:42 pm
I would probably say Science. While there are more things that can be opened with Lockpick, Science has the advantage of coming up more often in speech challenges, being used with crafting some things, can get you extra stims/chems at the start of the game, and is useful in several places for not getting shot up by robots/turrets...or turning them against your other enemies. Also, you don't need bobby pins to hack a terminal.
(Not sure why people say Barter. New Vegas has one of the most broken economies of any Fallout game. My characters that absolutely fail at barter still have no trouble making thousands of caps. The only thing worse was probably how you could abuse the repeatable speech challenge to blackmail the Iguana On A Stick seller in Fallout one.)