I understand you don't have to use it. But it's been my experience, when there are tools like that floating around, people are gonna want to use them. Especially if they bought the rulebooks for 'em.
I don't even remember how GURPS handled basic combat or contests (though I think there were a lot of attack/defense modifiers or something, for melee dudes in particular?), but ORE's virtue is that everything uses the same dice mechanic: Roll the dice pool, match the sets, and that tells you everything you need to know about the result, from damage, speed, location, etc.
I will go on about ORE now:
If Exampleguy has a body stat of 3d and and brawling skill of 3d, we roll 6d to determine his karate pool. A dice roller gives me the resulting sets of 2x6, 2x10. Exampleguy can choose either set, punching you in the torso or the head.
That's how basic skills work, but powers are built by determining what they do. A power has at least one quality, either being 'attack', 'defend' or 'useful' (which means anything that isn't attacking or defending).
A basic flight power would just have the useful quality, with a speed capacity (how far you can fly per round). The range would be determined by how many dice in the pool you have, so 10d in flight would be something ridiculous like, I think, 5 miles per round. There's a chart for these capacities, for speed, ranges, mass, etc. From this you can determine how far you can use your telepathy, or how much gold you can summon per round. You can get extras to boost them even further, and do other things.
But what if you want your flight power to also let you defend? It makes sense that a dude who can fly 5 miles a round should be able to zip out of the way of a train or whatever. You simply give it the defends quality as well, which tacks an extra 2 points per die to the cost. You could even turn your flight into a straight up attack power, allowing you to headbutt enemies or whatever. As an example, it seems kind of bland to view everything based on if it attacks, defends, or whatever else, but there's enough extras and flaws to really make things stand out.
The Progenitor setting has some of the best superpowers around. Even the ridiculous combat powers are set up in such a way that there's far more to it than "more dice wins".