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Brace yourself for a text wall.

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Why do I want to redo skills?

Firstly, I feel like there hasn't been much meaningful change to how dwarven skill words since the first release other than adding new skills or tweaking how fast they accumulate experience. The rather gamey system of 'do task, receive XP, level up' that is the core of the system has persisted basically unchanged.

This system has its problems. Firstly, growth is exponential - since task completion speed increases with level, dwarves start to acquire levels faster over time rather than slower. Secondly, all dwarves have the exact same potential to learn any skill. Dwarves who have never seen a tree in their lives, taking no instruction from any skilled individual, can immediately pick up the task of cutting one down and get better at it with. Your fort need never want for personnel, because there's literally nothing stopping you from training a dwarf to perform the desired role. Some may think this a good thing, but to me this is unrealistic and makes the game easier as time goes on - and seeing as boredom is the second highest killer of forts (behind the FPS) for experienced players, the game definitely doesn't need anything making it easier as you go along. Thirdly, generic EXP points in a skill is very gamey. Urist McMason has done nothing but carve doors all his life, but suddenly you ask him for a millstone and he carves one of equivalent quality of the doors he's been producing, despite having never seen a millstone or attempted one before, simply because they share EXP.

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So, seeing as I'm dissatisfied with the current system, here's a new system.

Dwarves ability to perform a job with speed and quality shall be determined by multiple stats instead of a single skill.

Firstly, dwarves will have talents. Talents will affect their speed and skill (item quality output for production jobs) at any job, though different jobs will be affected by different talents in different ways. Exemplar talents are dexterity (ability to do fine detail work) Aesthetic sense (ability to produce something others will consider beautiful) and learning (ability to learn new skills). Basically, all current physical stats and social skills fall into this category.

Talents will change over time and can change in different ways depending on the talent. For example, learning should be increased through education but should decline with age. This makes new 'training meta' possible.

Secondly, dwarves would have knowledge. Knowledge also affects how well a dwarf can perform a task, but it isn't inborn to them like talents are. Knowledge will be an exponential increase like the old xp system was, but ideally would be a much more gradual curve. Knowledge is not the same thing as experience, though, seeing as you'll need to train talents through repetitive tasks as well.  The key idea here is to make knowledge the most limiting factor early in your dwarf's 'career' and the least limiting factor later.

Finally, your dwarves will have theory. This is intended for skills that don't actually affect how your dwarf does their job, but determine which type of output that dwarf will produce. Right now this is basically limited to knowing a specific artistic style for dancers, musicians and poets. It could however be expanded to various philosophies, theocratic knowledge (can recount the legend of Urist McProphet's Martyrdom in Magma at the hands of Asog McGoblinNoble) or negotiation skills (knows noble etiquette of the Procedural Names civilization, can better negotiate with nobles of that civ. Alternatively, is fluent in the local dialect of The Region of ProceduralNames, and is thus more likely to befriend people from that region).

Or, as I dream of (but don't actually expect), we could make a system where simply knowing a lot about masonry in general doesn't mean you can immediately make a beautiful, artistic stone quern despite having never made or seen a quern before. If we were to do that, you'd need to be taught what a quern is before you can attempt it.

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So what does this system actually mean?

Firstly, it's meant to limit your options. Not every dwarf will have equal potential for all possible professions. If learning ability also decreases over time, your ability to have a dwarf have multiple professions will also sharply decrease as they won't learn as efficiently once they're older. Finally, lack of knowledge and ability to acquire it will mean that some fields of work will be less efficient to train anyway, meaning each fort will acquire a specific character as it becomes overly dependant on trading or alternative industries until you get that knowledgeable migrant with high teaching ability. Even after that, you'll have a sort of 'tech tree' unless you get a migrant who's done a specific subset of that industry before (i.e. you'll be able to make swords very well with your legendary weaponsmith, but since he's never seen how an axe is produced he won't make very good ones until a metalsmith who has comes along and gives him a little lesson).

Secondly, it'll necessitate some form of education system, which all societies (trust me, I'm an anthropology student) possess in some manner; it's not just schools like we have in the west, but also apprenticeships, learning from elders, tutors etc. There's already been a lot of topics on this forum on establishing various forms of education systems, but all of these presume the current EXP system remains in place, so they're not really compatible with this idea. I'd love to go more into depth here, but it's probably best to just throw in a system where a dwarf will just ask any dwarf with a theory associated with the knowledge group they're learned in to give them the theory when that dwarf is otherwise idle, and that dwarf will automatically give it to them. This'd serve as a placeholder until a better system can be devised (although one could be implemented at the same time as the new skill system in a much bigger update). I'm mostly motivated to not envision a system here because this post is already super goddamn long, to be honest, but how skills work and an education system are impossible to separate; when it's made necessary to have an education system, it means the nature of the skill has changed, and an education system is designed around the nature of the skill.

Finally; this would make the game considerably harder. Your fort would still get easier as you build it, the game would get easier in general slower, and wouldn't even have a guaranteed rate of getting easier as you wouldn't always get that desired migrant at the right time. This would unfortunately make it harder for new players to learn the game, but it would mean that players who do won't just make their perfect fort by year 5 and then run out of things to do that aren't pointless megaconstruction; they'll have long term goals that will actually somewhat depend on the RNG to make possible to attempt.

I think these 3 effects are largely desirable. The game will enter that boring late game lack of challenge later, it'll necessitate a new layer of complexity in how you run your society as you'll need some form of education system, and each fort would gain a sense of unique character alongside acquired realism.
That being said, obviously the system I've proposed might function better if its altered in some way, which I'll leave to y'all to suggest and Toady to test if he thinks this is vaguely worth it.

[NullForceOmega]

Considering the changes to fort control Toady is already intending on, I see no reason for this at all, other than to make my life as a fort administrator a face smashing hell on earth.  No thank you.

[Witty]

I like the general concept. As you said, the skills system is a holdover from the old 2D versions, back when the game was still very...gamey. Now that world simulation aspect is becoming more defined, I think it's seriously time to start ripping apart some of the old parts of fort mode that just don't fit. Artifacts are already on the chopping block, and I think skills should come soon after.

So in other words, I fully support.

[NW_Kohaku]

I had made up a thread in the past on a similar subject: Potential and Affinity.

Mostly, it was interested in preventing adventurers or fortress members from power-training a skill to legendary by doing nothing but swimming for a straight month or something.  Still, "affinity" is basically what you're calling "talent".

However, notably, there needs to be a real, decent on-screen indication of how well each dwarf will handle a given skill.  The biggest concern with all these attributes and personality traits and whatever affecting skills is that none of them are apparent to the player when they make decisions about who does what labor.

For that reason, what we need more than anything if there's something like this going on is just some simple, color-coded "this dwarf is good at this job" or "bad at this job" indicator when you're assigning duties.  Without that, you're just causing micromanagement hell, as you're creating situations where players have to go to the details pages of a dwarf to look at what they're good at, then back out and assign them labors.  (And make sure you're writing down who's doing what if you're not using Dwarf Therapist, or you'll get completely lost!)

Also, while maybe you picked it as a tool because a modern first-world person wouldn't know about it, but I should just note that querns aren't a terribly difficult concept.  "Hey, Urist, I need a quern." "What's a quern?" "It's a slab of rock with another rock on top of it you mash things with." "Oh, OK, that's ridiculously basic!"  Likewise, most dwarves are going to have had some introduction to the concept of what doors and tables and chairs and boxes are.