I agree, especially about the inconsistency in skill investment.
Not sure how to say this without breaking the rules, but the threshold of usefulness for a lot of skills is full of jank.
Just from my own experiences.
Just barely enough UE to start the climb in driving is enough that I can drive pretty consistently at moderate speeds.
Meanwhile I'm at the point where it's costing me about 1.5 - 2UE a point, and I still can't use artistry to @finalize anything even with the most basic materials.
And I'm at roughly equivalent levels of the appropriate statistics for either of these.
Meanwhile fighting as far as I've seen basically has two modes, no or next to no investment, or you dedicate your game life to fighting. There's no in between, because if you go with an in between and try to fight, you lose against those people who have invested all their UE in fighting, dodging, and stats related to that stuff... Mostly without fail.
I also honestly think the effectiveness of fighting against multiple people should be changed, I think it should be made much MUCH more lethal to be ganged up on.
I've personally seen a person with I'm guessing 6-7 months of UE spent purely in combat stats, ganged up on by a fresh Immy, a person with a one months training in their style of combat, and a person with around one or two months of UE in their skills and a person with three months UE in their skills. The experienced person had no nanos or augments as far as I knew.
RL wise, this fight would be a curbstomp, the person with 6 months training would be overwhelmed. Grabbed and smacked around by four people... In game the person proceeded not take a single hit, counter every blow that could have landed, and basically walk away with nothing happening to them.
In other cases I've seen very experienced fighters, three of them, with the weakest being one with I'd say about six months worth of combat training, go up against one of the characters I know of who is probably max UE with close to everything into a specialized Combat build. All of them with no armor on, and no drugs in their systems. These three characters proceeded to get decimated, three of them. Against one, who took maybe three hits during the entire fight. It was to the point that the combat heavy player basically grabbed one at one point and started playing around with them.
I get the need for high level hugely specialized characters to feel powerful, but I do believe the penalties for engaging multiple people... Aren't high enough from what I've seen and personally experienced. It shouldn't be an instant loss, but if you're attacked by three or more people and you are significantly more skilled than them, you should have a chance, but you shouldn't be nearly utterly invulnerable. Even at max UE. Especially at max UE.
Anyway... That's just my thought. TL;dr The curve of effectiveness for a lot of skills could use some tweaking... Combat could use a little bit of improvement as far as power scale and the might of the many versus the one.
P.S. And to be clear I'm not saying allow a swarm of twenty Immy's to smack down the highest skilled characters in the game. Though that should probably happen IRL... I'm saying make numbers and coordination more of an equalizer like sonics and drugs.