oh look. another thread that turned into "THE DEFENITION OF RPG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" never saw that one coming

That could've been easily helped with counting every point towards the threshold in favor for a chance of opening the lock (up to certain %) - a percentile check and chances of jamming the lock accordingly - and once the threshold was reached, the player could opt for a minigame or take his chances with a 95% success propability.

For example: Trying for a level 25 lock at skill 5 would give 20% chance to succeed; while locks above would remain harder (eg. 15% for level 50 lock, 10% for 75, 5% for 100) until you get past the previous threshold at which point every point in the skill would provide a 4% increment to the chance of opening the next threshold all the way up to 95% (at which point, as said, you could opt for busywork minigame if you wanted to), and so on. The more difficult the attempt, the more chance to jam the lock.

This would've made sure that every point counted for something and not only every 25th. And it would've at least partly held on to the design principles of the original games.

The same could to some degree be done with tiered perks too. Eg. No perks and the lock levels give chances from 20% downwards (the PC just doesn't know enough about the subject) the more difficult the lock gets. At rank 1, the esiest locks jump to 95% and the rest remain low but doable with a bit of luck.

It's only clutter by design. That can be helped.