In my personal opinion, attribute and skill systems are things that are only used in order to make a game playable - They have no purpose to exist, except to facilitate the instance of playing the game. Since one presumes when playing a game that it was designed with a difficulty and balance curve, this means there must be limits placed upon both any existing attribute and skill system. This is no less true in a game like Dungeons and Dragons or what you have.
There are two notable problems with such an arrangement. In real life, there is considerable variation amongst human 'attributes' to the degree that it is, in fact, entirely impossible to constrain the notion of human intelligence within the confines of a 10 point scale. It simply doesn't work, because intelligence in particular is a relative term. If we define it simply as capability to understand, integrate, and adapt to new ideas and concepts, then many people who might be considered reasonably intelligent otherwise become gibbering morons, and drooling imbeciles are ranked as geniuses because they can accept things that a reasonable person would have trouble accepting. If we define intelligence through I.Q., or a general aptitude test that ranks intellect based on visual recognition skills, mathematical ability, situational awareness, etcetera, then conventionally intelligent people become the new dumb compared to everyone with extenuating circumstances who excel in particular areas and blah blah blah blah
The point being that intelligence is a series of hills and valleys that people walk through and while it can be statistically measured in terms of variances or agreed upon measurements, a single point score in an attribute system cannot begin to even approximate the concept.
A similar problem presents itself with charisma (are we pretty or simply eloquent? Perhaps we're a hideous mutant with powerful aphrodisiac pheromones? Maybe people like us for our sunny disposition? Perhaps our INTELLECT is what makes us charismatic?), endurance (endurance, stamina, vigor, willpower, hardiness, resilience, toughness, fitness, etcet), and in fact every other attribute.
If you're still with me, I am now getting to the point. :P
In Fallout, the Attribute system does literally nothing but allow you to pass a few speech checks, determines starting skill points, and adds bonus points to particular skills, full stop. That is literally all they do (barring 'accessory' functions like how many implants you can receive in New Vegas). The Skill system is massively biased towards high intelligence since that means more skill points, but ultimately even a low-performance autistic with an intelligence of 1 can still max out skill scores.
If one entirely ignores the attribute system and ONLY looks at skills, things seem to make a lot more sense. The skills themselves do not raise any of the same conflicting questions that the Attribute scores do. "How can I have maxed out speech and barter if I have an intelligence and charisma skills of one?" The answer is: Attributes do not reflect who you are. They reflect how difficult it was for you to become who you are.
In Development Psychology there is a term called 'Canalization,' accompanied with the metaphor of a ball bearing rolling down an inclination or a groove on a hill. Because of gravity and the shape of the groove, there is very strong pressure or influence for the ball to travel in that one direction. Despite this, there always exists the possibility that the ball will roll in an unexpected way, because shit happens yo? Different facets of the human conditions are canalized to different degrees. Rooting behavior in infants, for example, is very highly canalized. Fear of darkness and the unknown is canalized to a fairly high degree, as is fear of heights, spiders, and snakes. Susceptibility to PTSD is canalized to an extent (higher stress levels and a greater physiological response to stress means enhanced reflexes), intelligence is variably canalized, the list goes on. The point is, of course, that everything is canalized and variable, and thus everything can be either harder or easier to achieve between individuals.
If we take this metaphor and apply it to the Attribute System, that means a person with a score of 10 in intelligence has a very easy time learning new things (improving skills) and is, in a general sense, more likely to pursue activities associated with high intelligence (since they are more likely to succeed in initial attempts). The metaphor breaks down slightly if we apply it to attributes like strength (since damage done with melee weapons and unarmed strikes is based both on your skills score in those areas AND your attribute score in either strength or endurance), but ultimately the result isn't that two martial artists with unarmed tagged and different endurance scores are inferior/superior to each other. It simply means one has to try harder, perhaps practice more to get the same results.
In other words: Attributes kind of suck and are generally only worth considering for the purpose of gameplay considerations. I want a lot of skill points, so better dump everything into intelligence - but that doesn't stop me from putting points into melee weapons, even with just a strength score of 5. On a personal note, I don't believe in the concept of luck - I believe in chance and statistical probability, but not Luck. So Luck is always my dump stat whenever I play Fallout. All in all, I ONLY CONCERN MYSELF WITH ATTRIBUTE SCORES TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY INFLUENCE SKILL SCORES, and otherwise I simply don't give a damn.
With that in mind, I feel free to define my character through their skills. "This guy is really smart, but he doesn't have very high skill scores in anything except barter because he doesn't have a lot of practical experience." "This guy is really, really ugly AND stupid, but he has a high speech and science score because he has a background in filing research articles."
'-'
So uh
Yeah sorry about that.
Words just happened and stuff.
EDIT: Also, to capture the idea of 'skills' in the sense of accomplishments not covered by the tag and skills system of Fallout (perception requirements to spot traps for example - I based whether or not Dallas/Sabin would spot Poe's grenade prank on their Perception scores), one presumes that there are 'unlisted' skills that cannot normally be trained in the manner most skills are, such as spatial awareness - which would be more likely to improve or deteriorate across long periods of time due to stimuli rather than experiences, no? In which case the Attribute that assigns your starting points in these unlisted skills becomes an important factor of consideration, ala Poe's grenade prank. I may have run an attribute check past Dallas and Sabin, but if somebody else with a high spatial awareness skill score came along who could demonstrate such even if they had a low perception score, I probably would have let it pass.
